Animal Crossing New Horizons came out about a week after my school was shut down for COVID. As a textbook girly-girl, I had been operating under the assumption that video games simply weren’t meant for me– even the ones with little animals running around in human clothes. But after a week or two of lockdown combined with steady nagging from my friends, I caved and downloaded Animal Crossing. It didn’t take long for me to become completely obsessed with the game. In the first few weeks of my obsession, the time I spent not playing the game was time I spent hunched over stacks of graph paper that I had used to map out the ideal layout for my island. My friends and I gave each other constant updates on our progress, sent each other in-game mail, and visited each other’s islands. If the COVID lockdowns had starved me of the social nutrients I needed, the Animal Crossing craze was an IV hooked up to my arm, delivering a synthetic version of all the things I was missing out on. Unable to do anything in real life, my friends and I scheduled in-game aquarium dates, fishing trips, and starry picnics. There was something really funny about being able to chase my friends around and whack them with my butterfly net. It may have all happened on the screen of my Nintendo, but we were all left with real feelings of social connection. Through the power of voice calls and customized avatars, we were all able to feel a little less isolated, but the value of video games as digital spaces goes beyond the months of lockdown. Over the course of the last year, the perceived loss of “third spaces” has been widely discussed. A “third space” is any place that is not home or work– like bars, parks, and libraries. The loss of these spaces is said to be the consequence of rising costs of living eating at disposable incomes, residual inclinations to “social distance,” as well as the rise of the digital spaces. Trite as it is to point out, today’s young people exist in this paradoxical state where we are hyper-connected to the digital world but fail to connect socially. One thing, however, always seems to be left out of these conversations about connection in the digital age: not all digital spaces are created equal. There is a huge difference between scrolling through Instagram and playing Fortnite. Social media promotes this sort of window-stalker connection. You can like, comment, and post all you want, but nothing real is happening. Rather than an actual dialogue, social media platforms like Tiktok and Instagram operate on a call-and-response system. In video games, however, your actions have a level of narrative impact on the situation. Your responses and actions aren’t simply thrown out into the void; rather, they exist as things with cumulative effects. The interactions you have with other people require thought, clear communication, and teamwork. When you play video games, you are having a legitimate interaction with another person. The same cannot be said about leaving a nice comment on someone’s Facebook page. I believe that the digital spaces created by video games have provided my generation with the unique opportunity to socialize through the internet in a way that is stimulating and meaningful. Video games have the potential to help fill in the “third space” gaps and create a social landscape that isn’t divided but instead brought closer by the internet. Playing video games is interacting with real people in real time– something we could all do more often.