Schedule a Gamer Night — it’s life-changing

polygon.com:

These days, anybody who talks to me about video games hears a key phrase in my lexicon. “Oh, I watched my friend playing that at Gamer Night.” “I have to install it in time for Gamer Night!” “I finally finished it during Gamer Night last night.” Since 2020, my Thursday night has been Gamer Night, and it has changed everything for me.

This is not just me bragging about having friends, although I am very grateful to have them. If you were a lonely kid growing up, like I was, you can probably relate to how amazed I feel to have consistent friendships, let alone a yearslong standing commitment to meet up (virtually) with the same group of people every week. You might be thinking, I don’t have any friends who would want to do that. Or you might be thinking, We’re all too busy for that.

I thought all of those things, too, and not that long ago. Before it became enshrined in my life as a standing weekly commitment (albeit one that any of us can miss, since there are four of us, and Gamer Night is just as fun with three or two), the whole idea of Gamer Night seemed unnecessary and maybe even impossible, scheduling-wise. Before Gamer Night, I had more of a freewheeling approach to playing games. Every now and then, there’d be a cool multiplayer game I wanted to try, and I’d sometimes manage to convince a few friends to play it with me. That would always involve some irritating scheduling shenanigans, and it would almost never happen as often as any of us wanted it to. That was a perfectly fine way to live. But I had no idea how much better it could be.

Gamer Night was born in my own life as the result of organizing a player group for a multiplayer game. It started in the fall of 2019, when two friends and I got super into Destiny 2, which has a lot of three-player co-op activities. This led to us trying some raids, which are more high-intensity cooperative multiplayer activities in Destiny 2 that require six people and therefore a lot of scheduling coordination. In the end,