I’ve spent most of the weekend playing Team Fortress 2. I haven’t done that in years.
I hadn’t intended to. Team Fortress 2 exploded into my life as a near-obsession back in 2007. Playing almost every evening, hour after hour into the night, even dreamed about it during the height of the passion. I used to wander around the maps on my own in private servers just to look at the artistry of the world, and watched countless hundreds of YouTube videos of how-to jump videos and devastating frag runs when not actually playing the damned thing. But then, as always with multiplayer shooters, I fell away from the servers, and as with all the other competitive games that came before it, I became a stranger.