This was one of my favorite online games when I was in high school. I mostly played during the beta, when it was still just called Ghost Recon Online. I used to make videos going over balance changes; back when youtube still had the video replies feature, there were other fans of the game that I would have back-and-forth discussions with that way. I would post on the game's forum and contributed a terrible mspaint achievement icon for a contest or something. This game was originally going to come out on the Wii U as well, and it was one of the games I was most excited for because my laptop didn't run the game very well. By the time I had a Wii U, the game was out, the Wii U version was abandoned, and I had pretty much entirely stopped playing. At present the game has been shut down long enough that even if you wrote a review on this website as early as you could, you would be going off years old memories.

I guess, what I'm getting at is that this is just part of growing up, part of time passing. Friends, online and in person, that you don't talk to anymore, places you can't go. The stream behind the house of a family friend is now the property of a stranger, and "Ghost Recon Online" is a game for which The Moment has so totally passed that it practically does not exist.

Tevis Thompson's review of Fortnite is a great read, but has had a frustrating impact on the way some people talk about the game. It's an excellent account of one person's experience, but that's just it, it's one person's experience. The passage of time is not a thematically important element of Fortnite anymore than changes to the map generation are thematically important to Minecraft. Not being able to easily make a new "Glacier" seed on the current patch did leave my teenage self with a kind of somber longing, and those emotions are real, but you can't expect them to communicate this feeling effectively to another person, and this is rather important because I would argue, and I think many would agree or at least relate, that the entire point of art is to create objects which can communicate in that way. Thompson's review spends a portion of its word count responding to Dan Olson's critique, the idea that Fortnite is ultimately just a store, but even more ardent defenders of Fortnite as more than just "the game where Goku kills Darth Vader" will lovingly compare the game's impermanence to a corner-store under new management.

An online game, dead or completely warped, no longer the same object or anything at all, can be sad. It can be disappointing, it can make you truly feel a real emotion, but that doesn't make it art. Ghost Recon Online is not an abstract painting representing the loss of innocence, it isn't even the school where you learned your first instrument, it is the laser-tag place you went to for your girlfriend's birthday when you were a teenager. It's the sandwich place that used to be your favorite restaurant in the mall food court; the sandwich is nothing special, you can get it anywhere, there are other restaurants in the same chain other places in town, you could probably even make a better one yourself if you bought the ingredients at the grocery. The sandwich was never the important part, it's the time of your life you spent eating it, and the people you shared it with.