Forty of us, one screen, and a lot of little bats

We had been a group chat for the better part of a year before anyone said the obvious thing out loud: we should actually be in the same place sometimes. So in June we rented a slightly too small back room at a cafe that tolerates us, set up a projector, opened a voice channel for everyone who could not make it in person, and called it a community night.

About forty people turned up across the room and the call, which was roughly thirty-eight more than we planned for.

The main event

The plan was to pass a controller around and take turns on Vampire Survivors, one person steering while everyone else shouted advice. This was a terrible idea and the best part of the night. Forty people have forty opinions about which upgrade to take, and every single one of them was certain.

There is a specific kind of joy in a room full of people all groaning at the same near-miss.

We got a run past twenty-five minutes, the screen turned into the usual wall of monsters and damage numbers, and the whole room made a noise I can only describe as a cheer that had given up on words.

What we learned

Spectating a hard game together is underrated. Nobody needs to be good. Nobody needs to win. You just need a shared thing to lean toward, and a game generous enough to make a near-miss feel like a story. We ran a few more of these over the following years, and this messy first one is still the one people bring up.

If you want to know who "we" actually are, that story is on the about page. And if you missed it, the game that started it all is reviewed here.