While watching The 400 Blows, I felt a deep and urgent anxiety about the way I spent my own youth. I did a lot of things that normal schoolboys did – I made friends, I copied somebody else’s homework, and I skipped school. But in many other ways, I lived entirely apart from them. I didn’t play sports. I wasn’t part of a cool clique. I didn’t go to pool parties. I didn’t dance. I didn’t go out with girls.

I think this was because gaming came into my life very early. I trace it back to a moment in my early childhood, when the other kids from the block wanted to play soccer. I wanted to play too, but because they were going to play all the way at the corner of our street, my mom said I was too young to go with them so I should play by myself.

So I took refuge in the lonely world I knew: toys, books, and video games. Throughout the years, the gap between me and other kids widened – I was trash at soccer but great at videogames, so I kept doing what I knew best. I played many, many games, and beat as many as I could. I learned the strategies as well as a child could learn them, and moved on to harder games. As a Mexican native, my first language was spanish, which meant that playing RPGs was difficult. But I loved them, so I learned English, and beat those games too.

Because videogames were a relatively rare hobby when I was growing up, my friends were relatively rare. But these friendships were deep.

My neighbor was the first person I knew, other than my brother, who loved videogames the way I did. For years we would borrow each other’s games, and spend afternoons playing Super Mario Kart and Super Bomberman 2. Whenever I’d rent a new game, I would call him to come check it out, and we’d play it together.

Later, during one of those days that my mom had to bring me to the school where she worked, I met the son of her best friend. His name is Luis. I played basketball with Luis, but I was terrible at it. His mom offered to bring me to her house so I could hang out with Luis until my mom, who worked late, could pick me up. So I did, and it so happened that Luis had an NES. Well, I was great at that, and the friendship was struck. I saw Luis almost every day from when he was in 5th grade all the way to 10th grade, and then I’d still see him at least once a week. He introduced me to a lot of NES, PS1, and PS2 games I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I remember a time when he brought Final Fantasy X to my house every day for a few weeks so we could play it together, and I would translate the story for him. During all that time, Luis was practically a brother to me. The latest time I visited my hometown, I saw him, and it was as if no time had passed at all.

For the three years I was in middle school, my cousin Daniel came to live with us while going to university. He and I must have put a minimum of 500 hours into Super Smash Bros Melee, though neither of us got particularly good at it. Daniel is an amazing storyteller today, capable of turning any day of his life into a story, tensing and loosening the plot while describing the beats with just the right amount of detail. I wish I could write as well as he can spin his yarn. But when I remember all that time we spent playing Smash while talking, I realize that helped him develop his skill.

At the same time, videogames turned my life in yet another direction. Around the early 2000s, Dance Rhythm Games were starting to become popular. The dance game that most American gamers would know is Dance Dance Revolution, made by Konami. But in the city I grew up, Torreon, a scene started to grow around the Korean-based Andamiro’s Pump It Up series. Because my brother was the social one in the family, he became part of that arcade scene about a year before I did. But when I got into it, it became an obsession for me. Soon enough we were both competing in tournaments, and we both started winning some, at least in the lower difficulty categories. Being the least social one, I eventually caught up with my brother – and surpassed him. At this point there were still better players in the scene, players that we all thought were unreachable. But I hit the arcades every single day and played Pump It Up for hours. A new game in the series would be released, and I would play it until I could beat every song with a ranking of ‘A’ in the hardest difficulty, or ‘S’ if I really set my mind to it.

There was another player that everyone in the scene considered untouchable: Rafa. This guy was high above us when we started, and no matter how much we played, he seemed to always loom far ahead. But once, during a local tournament, I ended up facing against him in the grand finals. The format was this: we played the same three songs, together, and at the end tallied up the score to decide the winner. I recall beating him on the first song, and he beating me on the second. Then, for the final round, we picked one of the hardest songs in the game. I distinctly remember the moment I gave up: my legs were failing me, and my lungs were burning up. But the crowd cheered me on to keep playing. I got my second wind, and managed to finish the song alongside Rafa. Somehow, my score was higher than his, so I won.

After that time, my brother left to the United States, and I was left to play the game alone, unrivaled. Two years later, another promising player began to rise through the ranks, but was still a couple of notches below me when I left for the US. When I next visited Torreon, I saw him at the arcades. His skills had grown far beyond my own, with no hope for me to catch up. I never really got back into the game after that.

When I moved to the US, gaming still offered me a way to cope with the challenges of adjusting to a new culture: I’d play multiplayer games with my cousin Roberto, and PS2 games with Edwin. Having access to gaming blogs also gave me something to look forward to every day. But, for the most part, I would spend the next 6 years using games almost entirely as escapism, as a sedative. I must have spent 10,000 hours playing single-player games during this time, on anything from a DS to Wii and a PC. The only thing worth noting here is my entry into the world of gaming forums through the IGN Wii Lobby. It was there that I developed my writing skills by spending hours every day arguing with strangers about Metroid and Zelda.

Then, in 2012, I found a group of Nintendo gamers who would play Call of Duty, Monster Hunter, and Splatoon every day. While my High School and College classmates were out there landing their first office job, getting married, or even having kids, I was somewhere off in the virtual world hunting Lagiacrus and Deviljho with people I would go on to consider some of my very best friends, up there with anyone else in my life. I met these strangers on the internet, but it wasn’t long after I started regularly talking and playing games with them that I realized that these were truly close friends.

There is a moment I had while visiting one of them, Mike, that stuck with me. We were at a microbrewery, and I was happy to have finally met Mike in person and to be spending time with him. We talked about stuff people talk about with their friends: work, family, the news, the weather, our hopes for the future. Then we started reminiscing.

“Do you remember that time we were fighting the Shagaru Magala and the hunt came down to the last minute? It was nuts!” We recounted every detail about that fight. “You know something? I didn’t tell you guys during the fight that I forgot to bring my Mega Potions.” We couldn’t believe the daring item swap we pulled off while the Shagaru was staring us down. But that’s just the sort of clutch decision-making you needed to beat monsters like the Shagaru, we said. And we remembered how, when we were all out of health and out of time, our friend Matt got up on a platform, stared down the Shagaru, and jumped straight at it just as he was getting pounced on.

“I can’t believe that’s what finally killed it. That could very well be the best gaming moment in my whole career.”

We were two people of different ages who grew up playing with magic toys; who went to the internet to talk to strangers about their love for them, then left one internet message forum for another due to ideological differences with the moderators; who developed their love for writing while blogging about these games like they were the key to wordly and inner peace; and who flew across the sky to meet each other in person and have a beer. And what were we talking about over that glass of beer? How entirely fulfilled we were upon defeating a fake monster in a virtual world.

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The title of this article is a question because I don’t have an answer. All I have are interpretations of my past: gaming gave me a sedative for loneliness during my youth, keeping me from ever getting desperate enough to seek normal friendships and ask girls out on dates. The few times that gaming took a backseat to my life, I’d feel myself reaching a small level of social normalcy. But many of those friendships made outside of gaming have not lasted, with very few, strong exceptions.

Gaming also gave me an ability to learn new rules and systems, and to pay attention to important details and strategies. This is most likely what allowed me to become a decent writer despite not being a hard worker. I believe it’s also what’s allowing me to learn skills I should have had earlier, like cooking or just plain talking to people. Next up will be dancing, swimming, playing a physical sport, and – this is how much I escaped my childhood – riding a bike. Finally, Gaming has given me some of my best friendships, sometimes as a shared interest, and sometimes through the act of playing games together.

My belief is that, in spite of feeling childish and naive when I compare myself to many of my peers – the kind who are married with children and working a steady office job to pay their student loans and house mortgage – I have a strong foundation in my friendships and my learning skills. It’s a lifestyle that has weakened me, but also made me stronger and more stable.

In another 10, 20, or 40 years, will I look back at my youth and wish I had spent it differently? Or will I still be grateful for the opportunity to have lived a life unlike anything my ancestors could imagine?