Clearing Out My Friends List.

We’ve all got “those” friends we’ve known for years that you just can’t get rid of. The kind that phone you on a Saturday night face-down on some viscous, urine soaked carpet in a club asking when you’re going to pick them up. Whose exuberant mischief – influenced by hours of gregarious intoxication – has concluded with a overnight tenancy at the local police station. That show up at your house at 6 am (still drunk) begging you to forgive them for defecating on your sleeping grandma that one time at some family BBQ. Then there are the anonymous ones you’ve never met, that contact you regularly with virtual invitations to games you haven’t played in years. Yes that O so cumbersome friends list on our respective games receptacle, comprised of the most socially virulent contemporaries. These compulsory yet all too fleeting companions that can become a conflicting nuisance on consoles. On the one hand they are an invaluable resource for subduing enemy combatants in COD, or crucial companions that placate the need to waste your own valuable inventory in GTA: Online. They command respect, but also your sustained compliance, contacting you with invites to a game you don’t necessarily want to play. Now your left with an awkward decision to make. Do you join them and make a half arsed effort to participate in any number of objectives they wish to complete? Do you contact them and politely decline their persistent requests for support, owing to some personal endeavours you wish to complete, potentially alienating yourself from any further collaborations? Or comply to a method that I have been extensively testing for almost half a decade; feigning ignorance to their communications and maintaining that my faulty PlayStation didn’t notify me of their generous offers.

The whole idea of recruiting friends is a logistical cluster buck anyway. For the most part many of the people you befriend are recruited because of their respective proficiency’s in a single game, limiting their relevance as accomplices to any other games. From a personal perspective I find that playing the same game for huge lengths of time rather boring. Participating in varied content enables me to break the monotony of repetition, so absconding the advances of these supplementary friends is the only way that I can suitably cultivate a much more congenial gaming experience. But because I indulge so regularly with various genres means there are several extraneous friends I’ve accumulated through years of extended exposure, with my friends list now clogged up with some of the most absurd pseudonyms that can’t possibly been chosen with any hint of sobriety. For years I’ve regarded their perennial visitation as a comfort. That somehow retaining their services – even though I don’t utilise their skills as often as I could – was beneficial. Now I view them with curious indifference, like fellow passengers on a bus. I can see them but feel no proclivity to interact with them. There are some with whom I’ve shared hours of exhilarating victories, forging a potent alliance in Resident Evil 5 for instance, and others I haven’t interacted with for almost 5 years?! Due to extenuating circumstances such as life, maturity and predominantly nappy changes (my daughters, not mine!) I’ve become a far more casual gamer, reliant on the complicity of domesticity. As such I’m reduced to either single player campaigns that I can jump in and out of without too much interference or very brief online excursions with say Uncharted 4 multiplayer. I’m not permitted extended periods to appease every invite I receive to aid a friend. I don’t exchange regular dialogue with any kind of routine for my presence to even be acknowledged to most. Many of these superfluous comrades consist of participants I haven’t played beside for years, with games I either don’t play or don’t own anymore.

Perhaps it’s time to reduce these residual compatriots. To clear the cache as it were. To say a fond farewell as I bid hours of collaborative frivolity adieu, with a quick nonchalant click and delete all permanent trace of their vaguely familiar tenure. It was fun guys, however brief. God speed…..Oh wait, I haven’t got any friends? Huh! I guess that’s what happens when you don’t respond for almost 5 years…….damn that’s cold!

How do you deal with your friends list ? Let me know in the comments below. Cheers.