Player One, Player Two

By Jason Killingsworth

Six months after starting college at the University of Florida, I joined a secret society. The Greek-letter social fraternity in question was originally founded in the mid1800s by a tight-knit group of men, with the aim of promoting leadership, friendship, strength of character and even literary achievement. These same ideals were espoused in the fraternity's creed and founding documents when I arrived. However, during private weekly chapter gatherings, you were far more likely to hear someone recount a lurid sexual encounter than ask for feedback on the early draft of a novel or poetry collection.

Even if the grueling exercise of fraternity pledgeship too frequently offered a case study in men behaving badly, I still treasure the experience. There were a good number of fraternity members who took the organization's founding ideals seriously. And one of those men happened to be my older brother, Trey. There are a host of fraternity rituals you experience on the path to initiation—many of them spiritually meaningful, kept strictly in confidence between sworn fraternity members—and that world of knowledge and experience is something that Trey and I share to this day. On the day of my initiation, he was the brother who pinned on my fraternity badge. It was a rich, connective moment for us.

But this piece isn't about my friendship with Trey. I had a younger brother as well. And this story describes a different fraternal order—one that we constructed ourselves, built around an abiding, mutually-held passion for videogames. We had the good fortune of being able to create our own rituals. The founders of Greek-letter fraternities and other secret societies believed that people who share a very particular experience—pledgeship trials, rituals, initiation, even secret handshakes—will be bound together in custodianship of that rarified mutual knowledge.

Just because videogames are inclusive by commercial imperative doesn't mean that our experience of them proves equally universal. We create our own worlds as we play, and our own language to describe the experience. And we build communities and meaningful friendships throughout that process. Videogame consoles now reward us with virtual trophies and achievements, as if the spoils of gaming ever needed quantifying. How many gamerscore points is a sibling relationship worth?

How many gamerscore points is a sibling relationship worth?

My little brother Josh and I grew up in the same house, but our friendship developed slowly. There were four of us kids at the time and we unconsciously paired off like recess dodgeball teams. I gravitated toward Trey, my older brother. Josh found a companion in our younger sister Trinity. It should've been obvious to me at the time that Josh desperately wanted to hang out with his two older brothers, but for years I paid him little attention.