A gamer reflects on learning at age 12 that the best achievements came from top-tier teams, not solo play. In games and real life alike, your reputation is visible and matters: damage it and you lose collaboration opportunities. Meaningful work happens in community, whether gaming guilds, church, family, or Shabbat.
So at age 12, I realized that to do the most amazing things in the game, I had to be a part of the most amazing teams. It's very like that in real life. You have to hire the best people. You have to be a part of the best teams to do the best things. In the world of gaming, it's a little different because you have that avatar and you have a reputation to uphold. And if you sully that reputation, nobody's going to want to work with you anymore, just like in real life. So you can't be that troll that's hiding behind a screen. And don't get me wrong, like, I enjoyed doing that when I was 9 or 10 years old. You just don't get to do that as soon as you have an avatar because everyone knows what you look like. You have a name, you have a guild that you're a part of. So you have a reputation to uphold. And so community was really important. If you look at everything around us, if you're going to church or say you're doing Shabbat as an example, that's community. Hanging out with your family, that's community. Everything is community at the end of the day. And that's where I got my first taste of it. I was like, this is what it takes to be the best. This is what it feels like to have other friends, brothers, and sisters.
