LOS ANGELES / DENVER / CHICAGO – In a turn of events that surprised no one, game night with the boys was unceremoniously cancelled upon discovery that Dan forgot to update his fucking game again. Multiple reports came in Thursday night from sources nationwide, reportedly all of whom were frustrated dudes in their late-20s.
“He’s always fucking doing this. I’m at the end of my rope.” wrote Andy Schnieder, Dan’s once college roommate. “We find the one night we can all hop online, he has all week to make sure his game’s updated, and then the SECOND we get on Discord, he drops the bomb that he forgot to do it ahead of time. He doesn’t even have the decency to give us a heads up until we’re already sitting in the fucking menus waiting on him. I stayed up way later than I normally do for this. I mean, I’m two fucking timezones ahead of him; I’ve got work in six hours! Dan hasn’t had a fucking job in five and a half months!”
Further investigation corroborated Andy’s claims about Dan’s recent stint of unemployment. Many took to wondering why Dan couldn’t manage to download a simple update with so much free time on his hands. Cameron Hoffman, Dan’s friend from improv class, had a couple of theories as to why;
“Dan’s a fucking idiot,” said Cameron. “He always pipes up, ‘Oh don’t worry, this update should only take like 20 minutes max,’ but we all fucking know how shit his internet is. I send multiple reminders hours beforehand, ‘Hey, just remember there’s a 54 GB patch, it’s gonna take a while to download,’ but no. He gets like 10 Mbps download speeds; that shit is gonna take him 12 hours to download, at least. He moved back in with his parents but won’t upgrade from whatever antiquated dial-up shit they still use. What’s he gonna play on that kinda connection? Bejeweled? At this point, we’re tempted to just leave him behind and play some trios. Maybe we’ll autofill with some rando who’ll get more than two elims for a change.”
Despite Dan’s failure to launch, in more ways than one, not all of his friends were so quick to judge. Tristan Perez, Dan’s childhood friend, struggled to find a defense for the inaction taken time and time again.
“I mean, I think we can give Dan some leeway,” said Tristan. “It feels like games these days are always dropping constant updates at the most random times. There’s no way to stay on top of all of it, right? The game studios are always releasing broken games that need patching or constantly adding new battle pass updates every other week. It’s a lot to keep up with just to play a game with friends nowadays. To be fair to Dan, none of us are totally blameless. I’m the only one without a Gaming PC so we can’t really play anything exclusive on there. Andy never got a Playstation, so we can only play games with crossplay, so that limits things a bit. Cameron’s ancient graphics card is crapping out, so until he upgrades, most of our go-to games keep crashing on him… Honestly, I- I don’t know. My coworkers invited me to go out with them tonight, and I turned them down for game night, like- I could be out making real human connections with people, but instead, I’m listening to these guys all yell at each other that we can’t play ‘virtual army-man dress-up’ because Dan didn’t update his game. I’m just so tired. I can’t keep doing this. We should probably just stop being friends.”
As the weekly vitriol towards Dan waned in the following days, he finally felt comfortable enough to open up and provide context behind his total inability to update his games on time.
“I just really don’t want to play Modern Warfare III. Can we please play Fall Guys again?”
