The Strange Intimacy of Black Friday Shopping

We associate the holidays with intimacy. Bound by the traditions of various religions and secular obligations, we trek from place to place with smiles on our faces to talk to the people in our families and social groups that we like or, at the very least, can be in the same room with for thirty minutes. I’ve been bludgeoned by advertisements for this intimacy since the top of October: A multigenerational gathering of family members gets together, bonds, and exudes wealth to a generic singer-songwriter’s crooning. It’s your life in idyllic quality, and it’s all sponsored by your friendly neighborhood grocery store chain.

But I don’t think that kind of intimacy is the most interesting stuff that happens around this time of year. I’m more concerned about the activity that gets you talking to your friends, reading clandestine forum posts, and checking Twitter accounts that you only care about once a year: Black Friday sales on games.

Black Friday sales balance between two opposite truths. The first is that there is a massive, unbelievably large supply of games. The Titanfall 2s and Infinite Warfares that flopped up onto the shore of our collective awareness last month exist in such plenitude that we can’t get our heads around how many copies float in Amazon warehouses, Wal-Mart backrooms, and the drawers of Gamestop countertops. They exist there, waiting for us to care.

The other truth is that there is a scarcity to these games. You might be able to score that awesome new release for the 50% discount of $30, but there might only be a few hundred copies available for that price. We know in our heart of hearts that there is this vast ocean of Dragon Quest Builders just hanging out, but we race to get our hands on these copies. We digitally scramble over each other to learn what site to click on, when to click on it, and how to massage the load times of the click itself.

It’s flu season because we’re brought into close contact with one another. Our vapors intermingle.

Despite all of us being so far away from each other in our own homes using our own digital devices, it’s profoundly intimate. We’re all doing the same thing together, with the same crowd-sourced knowledge, and we’re working as one strange consumerist body. It’s me and you together forever (so we can buy $10 copies of The Division).

If you play that brand new copy of The Division, and I hope you will, you’ll discover a game that knew this intimacy well. Every year we read and watch the reports of people being trampled to death while trying to buy a television on sale, and The Division takes this one step further: a deadly virus placed on some money in the middle of a department store during Black Friday. A neighbor crashing into you with a shopping cart is a horrifying moment of intimate contact, but your neighbor bringing home the plague is that extra uncanny step.

That’s how The Division gets to the heart of the holiday season. It isn’t through showing us wreaths or sparkling decorations. It’s through showing us that the barriers that make us immune to one another get worn down around this kind of year. It’s flu season not because the flu just magically becomes more powerful; it’s flu season because we’re brought into close contact with one another. Our vapors intermingle.

I have a very clear memory of the first time that I played the open world zombie survival game Day Z. I was wandering around the map by myself. Sometimes I saw other people, but I tried to avoid them. I would search every structure I could find for food or weapons–anything, really, to keep me from dying. Unlike the video games in your local big box store, these items aren’t materially real. They can be produced infinitely. But just like the physical games that exist in those warehouses, these items can be strategically withheld for drama and anxiety. They are dripped to us in strategic amounts.

When I met a person across a building in those first weeks of Day Z, I felt the same as I do when I’m trying to get that Black Friday blender or that cheap HD re-release of my favorite game. Reality mixes together: I know that I could just wait and that this thing would appear to me, again, in its same form. But I’m trapped in the moment, and I’m trapped with this person. We don’t have any other choice. We both wants the virtual tin can of food or the PlayStation 4 game. The reality of things and our feelings about those things short circuit. Violence and conflict reign. Frustration and screaming is the deal of the day.

We can accept the cramped intimacy of consumer culture and transform it into genuine connections.

Intimacy isn’t unique to Black Friday or by scarcity-and-disease simulations, of course. There are plenty of moments of interpersonal closeness in the realm of games and online existence. Dark Souls lore communities, Crash Bandicoot speedrunners, and route-mappers for visual novels all enjoy a tight-knit relationship with each other. They’re people who are focused on the same goals, and that collective emotional love holds all of these diverse ideas and bodies together.

But the intimacy of the moment of consumption is something beyond love. It’s a moment where our lives are stripped down to our most simple desires: I want the game, or, I want to continue to play this game. Black Friday is the one day a year where we can see the social world that Day Z or The Division claims to be simulating. It’s where we’re intimately together, in competition, scrounging around in the shadow of artificial scarcity.

In Day Z, I can yell at that figure across the room. I can say that I want to share. In The Division, I can stand across the street from another player in the Dark Zone. I can signal that I want to share, that I want to help them defend their prize from the hordes of enemies that will spawn. I can take the intimate moment of competition and warp it into something positive and long-lasting. We can hunt for supplies and items together. We can even become fast friends.

That’s the best we can hope for, but it’s a lesson that these intimate games can teach us about the very real anxiety and stress of these bleak sales. To be kind. To extend a hand of help. To pause our most miserable and greedy aspects. We can accept the cramped intimacy of consumer culture and transform it into genuine connections. After all, a solo player eventually falls to greater enemies.