Why I Built Long Distance Games

The people I am closest to are mostly not nearby. Different cities, a few different time zones, one continent's worth of gap in the middle of some of them. Nobody planned it that way. It is just what happens after enough years of everyone taking the job that made sense.

What I noticed is that the friendships which held up were not the ones with the most feeling in them. They were the ones with something small and regular in them. A running joke. A thing you send each other. Some low-stakes habit that does not require either person to be having a good week.

The friendships that faded were often the ones where the only available format was the big catch-up call. An hour, scheduled, with the unspoken job of summarising two months of your life to somebody who is doing the same to you. Those calls are good. They are also expensive, and they are the first thing to get cancelled, and once you have cancelled twice it is easier to not schedule a third.

Long Distance Games is my attempt at the small regular thing.

The gap in what already exists

There is no shortage of ways to play games with people online, and almost all of them assume the wrong thing.

They assume you will both be free at the same time for an hour. They assume you will both install something. They assume you are willing to make an account, verify an email, pick a username that is not taken, and then find each other inside a system that treats you as two strangers who happen to be logged in. By the time both of you are actually in the same lobby, the impulse that started it is gone.

That is a fine set of assumptions for a hobby. It is a bad set of assumptions for keeping in touch with someone you love.

So the whole site is built around one interaction. You pick a game, you get a link, you send the link into whatever conversation you are already having. They open it, type a name, and you are playing. There is no signup step, no email, and nothing to download on either end.

Short on purpose

Every game on the site is short. Tic-Tac-Toe, Connect 4, a head-to-head Wordle, Dots & Boxes, Reversi, Battleship, Checkers, a dice game. Thirty seconds to a few minutes.

That is a deliberate constraint, and it took me a while to admit it was the most important design decision in the whole thing.

A short game fits inside a phone call instead of replacing one. You can play three rounds of Connect 4 while talking about something else entirely, and the game is not the point, it is the excuse to be on the call. A long game demands your attention and turns the other person into an opponent. A short game gives your hands something to do while you talk, which is roughly what sitting on a couch next to someone does.

It also means you can play when there is nothing to say. That sounds minor. I do not think it is. A lot of long-distance closeness dies because both people feel like contact has to be justified with news. Sending someone a Word Duel link at eleven at night justifies nothing and asks for nothing, and it still tells them you were thinking about them.

Nothing is watching

There are no ads on the site. There is no analytics. There are no third party scripts of any kind. Nobody is counting how long you played, and nobody is selling the fact that you played at all.

I want to be precise about why, because "privacy" has become a marketing word and it deserves better.

The straightforward reason is that the alternative is an insult to what the thing is for. If two people are playing Connect 4 across four thousand miles because they miss each other, the correct number of parties observing that is two. Instrumenting it would mean deciding that the interaction between two friends is inventory. I am not interested in building that, and I am particularly not interested in building that for this.

The less noble reason is that analytics would have changed the site. Once you can see a retention curve you start optimising it, and the version of this site that optimises time-on-site is a worse site. It would want longer games. It would want streaks and notifications and a reason to come back tomorrow. The whole value of the thing is that it asks for nothing, and a metric would have eroded that within a month. Not measuring is how I keep myself honest.

What actually gets stored is the minimum a game needs to exist: a room code, whose turn it is, the state of the board, and the name you typed in. Presence and the floating emoji reactions never touch the database at all, they only exist while you both have the tab open. Rooms are private and short lived, and they are kept out of search engines on purpose.

No account means there is no profile to build. That is not a feature I added. It is a consequence of not asking who you are in the first place, which is the only version of a privacy promise I actually trust, including from myself.

The honest limits

It is not a substitute for seeing someone. I want to say that plainly, because there is a genre of software writing that oversells this kind of thing and I do not want to join it. A game of Checkers is not a visit. Nothing on a screen closes the gap.

What it can do is keep the line warm between visits. That is a smaller claim and I think it is a true one.

I also built it because I wanted to. There is a version of this essay that pretends the whole thing was a considered response to a social problem, and that would be tidier and less accurate. Mostly I wanted to play Connect 4 with someone eight time zones away without either of us making an account, and it turned out that building it required thinking honestly about what the games were for. The essay is the result of the project, not the reason for it.

If you are curious how it works underneath, I wrote about the game abstraction and about why no client is ever allowed to write game state.

Otherwise: pick something, send the link to whoever you have been meaning to message. longdistancegames.com.