Character and Charisma #4

During the pandemic, my robotics team hosted social nights every Friday. It served as a place to get away from the chaos of trying to build a robot over zoom, and allowed my freshman self to connect with other people in the robotics community. Although the social nights were virtual, we played games like Gartic Phone, and Among Us through Discord. Going from middle school to high school, the only people I knew were 8-10 close friends. During the pandemic, I was very isolated from my friends, and needed an escape from dealing with my family. Social nights allowed me to connect with other people that had the same interests as me and the way in which we were able to be together in a virtual, gaming world was an escape from the harsh reality of the time. 

Though my parents have worked from home most of my life, it’s a different circumstance when you are forced to be together 24/7 with no escape at school, work, sports, or social clubs. It was even worse since my sister was stuck with me; her bickering with my mom felt never ending. Even more annoying, my mom decided to cook every meal at home. Her menu consisted of three rotating meals: Rasam, Dal, and Biryani. The first week was great, after the second week of eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I never want to eat it again.

With my family getting on my nerves, and me probably getting on theirs, social night was something I looked forward to every week – and crushing my opponents every time was an added perk.  Everyone on the robotics team attended social nights, it was a way for us freshmen to make friends with the upperclassmen. We would constantly ask them about which classes to take and how to get ready for college. I’m sure they were annoyed by the millionth time someone asked them about AP World History and if they could share their notes with us. During social nights, I became good friends with the senior programmer from our subteam, Aquahumzah. He was like any other friend and relieved my fear of seniors. Other than talking about random video games, he was helpful in guiding my selection for classes and teachers. It was interesting becoming friends with someone over Discord. I knew a lot about him, but hadn’t even seen what he looked like. I realized the importance of online community and how video games can allow you to build friendships. 

I started to become more interested in video games and started watching streamers and youtubers. It sparked an idea for me to start my own youtube channel. The whole point of the channel was to connect to others and build my own community outside of robotics and school. Not only that, it was a source of creativity for me. Video games were a place that I could use some of the programming skills I had learned in the robotics club. Additionally, I was able to highlight my computer knowledge and use some of the artistic creativity that I had gained from making the Five R video and channel it into a Youtube passion project with the intent of building a greater online community.