Making Friends Online
I have always been into computers and gaming online since around the age of 12 or 13. I guess it started with messing around with our family’s Ti-99/4a. A personal home computer released around 1981. I use to get computer magazines and back then they would publish codes to program games. It was pain stacking and took hours upon hours but in the end, you had a cool game to play.
Of course, I grew up on Atari asteroids and space invaders where my favorites. As the years went by so did the advancements in computers. Sometime in the late 90’s AOL chat rooms entered the scene. This was the perfect scene for not so social people to make friends and chat the night away. And so, I did. I made many friends online and still to this day I have some online friends who I have never met that I have known longer then friends in real life as some term it.
At some point I merged online gaming with online chatting. I believe it was the early 2000’s. I played Rogue Spear and Battle Field 1942 and found a whole new world of friends who I had everything in common with. The online gaming community has groups associated with gaming called clan’s, guilds and alliances. We use programs to chat live using microphones and earphones so that we can chat while gaming online. As I grew and formed long lasting relationships with the friends, I made in these groups we occasionally had the chance to meet in person. One such time was a friend who lived in Germany who I played Battlefield 1942 with. He was in town on business and my wife and me met up with him for lunch. It was a really cool experience.
Making online friends is also very helpful for a lot of people who cannot leave their houses due to medical issues. I have quite a few friends online in this situation. When my A.S. was at its worse I was home bound for almost 5 years where it was hard to even walk at times. That’s another story.
Currently my games of choice are Marvel Strike Force, Call of Duty Mobile and World of Warcraft. 2 of which I play on my phone and all 3 I belong to one of the groups I mentioned earlier. The people I am friends with in these groups are mostly scattered across the United States with a few being from oth er countries. One of my favorite online friends is from Scotland and it is a lot of fun to listen to him talk. His nickname is Cabbie because he drives a cab in Scotland. He always has interesting stories to tell.
Making online friends needs to be handled slowly in cautiously though. Not everyone online is out to have fun. Some are hackers looking for information to hack your computer, some are dangerous pedophiles or predators and some are what we call trolls. An online troll is someone who is there to say anything to get someone to get made. You will find these in Facebook groups a lot.
If you’re lucky and careful you may just make some lifelong friends online like I and many others have. And if your just not feeling friendly on any given day you can just not turn on your computer.
This is Will B. saying grab a cup of coffee, join a chat room and make a new friend