I was/am kinda hoping that with the slow adoption of VR/AR that we can kinda bring hanging out on the couch taking turns on games together.

There are apps like Big Screen that already let you share a screen together and hang out, but not easily play games and you can't share controls. EmuVR let's you share controls and hang out in a room with people but only retro games via retroarch.

If we could get a mix of the two where I could just put on my headset/glasses (in the future) join my friends room and we both kinda exist in each other's real life room via AR sharing screens it would be pretty good.

This is probably like a decade away, but for those of us with IRL friends who have moved really far away so hanging out in person frequently isn't an option, it could be a ray of hope.

Would still rather just meet up and crash over at one of our places with takeaway pizza taking turns on Resident Evil 1 until 3am.

Yep exactly. But with WoW 12 years ago. It was genuinely the best time of my life. I still tal about that era.

Me and the boys with timed challenge modes and raiding in WoW. At least we got realm's best on Scarlet Monastery :')

I just had a similar enough experience this sunday, playing boardgames with my gf and her friends (because my own friends were busy)

Before that, the highest high I got was around 2016, getting the gang back together for a lan party at my apartment. 5 dudes playing a couple of games and then finishing with Counter Strike 1.6. One of my friends was a hypercompetitive asshole and kept getting angrier the more he lost, which was fucking gold. Everyone else was simply laughing at how "serious" he was taking it

Same thing but with StarCraft.

For me it was the early days of wow.

The biggest Halo 1 LAN of the year is going on right now.

http://www.twitch.tv/beachlan

https://youtu.be/EdQXMHN1GGU?si=0yOT2pz_vLx2m-UZ

Quake III Arena Certified Noob here, we were gaming too, next to you guys.

Went to vocational school after high school because I didn't want to do 13th and 14th grade. The program designation was "electronics" but the back half was loaded with CS. The networking classroom split time between the day and night courses... in the days before user profiles. It was a shitshow. The night folks did not take kindly to our NUKEM workgroup setup, but it made for fun lunch breaks.