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From the Boston Globe, this is Love Letters.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
So my boyfriend, he occasionally likes to play video games.
He's not a huge gaming guy, but he does like narrative games he can explore over time.
So anyway, one day he tells me he got a narrative game for us to try together.
He bought it because it was rated highly as a couch co-op game, meaning a game for two people to play together, probably on a couch.
I'm not a gamer obviously, but I was curious, especially when I read the description of what he bought.
He didn't realize that the game he chose, simply based on good reviews, would be perfect for me.
Perfect for us at Love Letters.
The game is called It Takes Two, and it's about a couple having marital trouble.
This is the story of Cody and Meg.
Basically in, It Takes Two.
Two players take the roles of a husband and wife who clearly want to get a divorce.
Their daughter in the game cries magic tears on a magic love advice book.
I told you this was perfect for us.
Then the players become miniature toy people who have to navigate challenges around their home together, despite being fed up with each other, in order to unbreak the spell and reclaim their normal sized bodies.
So we start the game.
As players, we get stuck in different rooms in the home.
We're in a tree outside.
We battle the fictional elements freeing ourselves from mafia squirrels who live in the backyard.
The graphics are great.
The world feels massive.
The characters have wonderful dialogue to show how they grow.
But the meta thing of it all is that the actual players meaning us are growing in real life too, because we have to coordinate what we're doing with each other in order to win.
And it's not easy.
When one person is better at gaming than the other, it can lead to frustration.
I'm because none of it is intuitive to me.
My playmate is trying to help me without mansplaining.
He's trying to be patient while I make the same mistake over and over again.
Meanwhile, the characters are losing their shit at each other.
It's art imitating life, and vice versa.
The relevant thing here is that while playing this game, I started to feel like I was accidentally learning things.
And that made me wonder in this season about change.
Could video games change me or any of us for the better?
Today's story might give us an answer.
It's about a man who says he's been changed by video games.
They've helped him understand romantic love, his identity, and given him confidence as he engages with the real world.
My name is Anthony Oreña.
I am born and raised from Brooklyn, New York, currently living in Jersey.
I'm the youngest of.
I have three brothers and one sister, and then the next youngest is about years older than me, so i was always the baby of the family.
I come from a family of dominican american immigrants and i was the first to be born here, so in my family's eyes i was always the, the one, the one true american child, and so a lot of hope and expectation was placed on me.
One of the biggest forces in anthony's young life was his dad, my beloved father, antonio francisco, such a hard-working man.
For majority of my life all I've known him to be, other than my father, was a taxi driver.
He was actually a local cab driver.
He wasn't exactly an emotive type of person.
He was very funny, loved to play pranks on his kids, on my mom and all of that.
But beyond that, I never knew what was going on in his life, in his world.
But one thing I always found peculiar was his love of Pac-Man specifically, that one video game.
My siblings and I all grew up playing video games together.
We'd always have like a Nintendo at home, eventually a PlayStation, all of the systems as they came to be released.
We would eventually get them in the household.
But my father would not want to play any of the new stuff.
He didn't care about super Mario.
He didn't care about Pokemon, which I love, but he always loved Pac-Man.
And he told me that, yeah, I just grew up playing that.
We had an arcade nearby where I lived, where I grew up on the Dominican Republic.
And it was just a game that I would play all the time.
As I'm looking back on it, a crucial part of how I connected with my father back then.
It was those quiet moments of us taking turns playing Pac-Man that really fostered my ongoing love for video games as not just a form of entertainment but a way of connecting.
Pac-Man teaches Anthony about connection.
But more than that, it leads his perspective on what to value from a young age.
That it's okay to care about something beyond work and to spend money on things that bring joy.
But it wasn't all fun and games.
Anthony spends a lot of childhood very focused on school, aiming to be this incredible success story for his immigrant parents.
And amid this pressure, he's also dealing with new feelings and trying to figure out who he is.
So, you know, I identify as queer, as a gay man.
And growing up I don't know the exact year or age when I had that realization like oh, I'm not gay, what the typical norm is that I'm seeing around me, because I'm noticing that everybody is.
You are a man, you're supposed to be interested in women.
But I do remember that there was at one point an early age where I'm realizing that I don't necessarily share those emotions.
And I didn't know if I felt safe sharing that difference with my family.
I remember sitting in my bedroom, which I shared with some of my brothers, And we were watching a wrestling match like WWF.
And one of the wrestlers.
He comes out and the theme.
You know most of the wrestlers, as they come out they have a particular theme song attached to them.
And this one wrestler had one called like sexy boy.
And I remember hearing the lyrics like sexy boy, things like that.
The wrestler's name was Shawn Michaels, and he did have a whole routine.
Sexy boy.
And as a kid, I'm forgetting how old I was.
I was definitely a child, maybe like eight or so.
I remember telling my brother like, oh, you know, that's a good song because he is a sexy boy.
And my brother immediately looks at me.
He's like, what did you just say?
I was like, that's a perfect song for him because he's a sexy boy.
Look at him.
And he told me like, you never say that.
Never say that again.
This is not something that you say about anyone or anything.
Because I remember him just moving on and me not feeling comfortable safe, following through any further.
But I think that was a point in time where I realized like oh, is there something wrong about my sense of attraction.
And as I would grow up, you know, I felt a little bit more, I guess, like I had to be more silent or careful about what I said with respect to who I was attracted to or my particular romantic desires.
As he grows up, Anthony doesn't have examples of gay stories in his real life.
He can't really talk about that part of himself with those around him.
But in games, especially the newer ones, where there are big stories and plots about the complexity of love, it's all there.
Big emotions, characters who can be and date whoever they want.
And these possibilities within video games open Anthony's world to more.
There's one game Anthony recalls as really representing how he felt about love at the time.
It was Final Fantasy X, which came out in 2001.
This is a role-playing game in particular, and for me it features one of my favorite love stories of all time across film movies music, anything.
And not to get too much into the details of the story, but in particular, the larger thing that you see going on is sort of this story of fated lovers who, by virtue of their circumstances, are fated to never actually be together.
And so they have these shared moments in time where they're battling this great evil, they're supporting one another, but then, at the end, there's this really heartbreaking moment where part of what they need to do in order to end this big challenge they're confronting is to actually you know, it involves self-sacrifice, and one of them ends up not being in the picture anymore.
And so it sort of ends with this very hopeful yet extremely bittersweet moment where Yuna, the female protagonist, she is essentially grateful that they've got rid of this big, challenging monster and all of that, and they've saved the planet.
But, at the same time, what she's really longing for is her partner, her lover, and all she has of him are those memories that they shared together.
And he can never be with her in person ever again.
And so you gotta just have to sit with that reality that the time they spent together was necessary to heal the planet in its own way.
But once that healing was done, they had to, they were fated to part forever.
It's a straight storyline, but he related.
Thinking back I'm not so sure I thought about it back then, but for sure in this moment now it kind of mirrored the sort of tension I felt in my own relationships or my hopes for relationships, where it's like from a young age I was, you know by not to blame my siblings or anything like that but I was taught in a way that what I'm attracted to, what I understand love to be, is wrong and that I'm not allowed to follow it in this way and that this is sort of like a forbidden love.
And now I'm playing this game that does not feature queer characters but very much so is still talking about forbidden romance in a certain way.
Romance is not meant to last forever for whatever reason.
That resonated heavily with me as well too, so.
What age would you have been when you were playing that Final Fantasy?
So I was 11 years old, yeah.
For a while, Anthony lives vicariously through these games.
But they push him to confront himself a bit more too, to consider what he can do with these feelings.
It isn't until college that Anthony is more public with his true identity.
He goes to Brown University, where he learns what it's like to have a boyfriend and a bad breakup.
He experiences what it's like to be cheated on and how to navigate hookup culture.
He begins to learn how to experience romance in the real world.
But while life at school is going well, things start to deteriorate at home.
At this time, Anthony's dad is being treated for diabetes.
His parents come to visit in the spring of his junior year and Anthony notices that his dad is having trouble walking.
And I asked my mother, like, is everything okay?
She said, yeah well, the last time he was in the hospital he did like suffer some damages and he's recovering all of that.
So that was actually the last time I had seen him in person.
After the death of his father, Anthony decides to move closer to home.
He finishes his undergraduate work and goes to Columbia University in New York for his PhD.
Between school and grief, it's a difficult time.
The video games played a huge huge huge, huge role in sort of how I navigated the stress of that process as well to writing a dissertation.
I remember spending hours at the computer typing away, and then the one way I found A way to catch my breath was to just shut it all off and turn on a video game.
I think now about playing the original Super Mario Brothers game during my parents' divorce in the early 90s.
I tell Anthony it was soothing for me.
I imagine that playing games was part of his healing process too.
What you mentioned about self-soothing through video games.
That was absolutely something that I'm not sure I was consciously doing, but it's absolutely the effect that I experienced at that time.
Because oftentimes the Larger public conversations we have about video games are that it's a form of escapism, that it's a form of mindless indulgence.
But what I found that, yes, there was a bit of escapism there as well, too.
It did trigger a sense of mindfulness of being present in something other than the difficulty of whatever the circumstances are in that time period.
As Anthony heals, he also starts to love more.
He meets new people and has more significant romantic relationships.
One big one. is in 2015.
I had just gotten out of a separate relationship with someone who I had met on a dating app.
It was like Tinder or something.
And it was a typical early 20s romance where you meet somebody, you hit it off and we had dates here and there.
We'd go have dinners at restaurants.
It was nothing in particular of note.
That relationship soured down the road however, because I had learned that this person was not yet out to their family and was not actually comfortable with himself about his sexuality.
So that actually led to a lot of misplaced rage and anger that was projected onto me.
That was the first time I had ever engaged in a relationship that involved so much emotional and certain respects like physical turmoil that when it ended it was shocking.
But it was also a huge relief because It sort of clued me in that oh, romance isn't so cut and dry or clear and easy as we think it is.
It's not like the clear and fun narratives and the beautiful narratives we see in video games or movies or books, but that it's messy and it can be really challenging.
I remember feeling like, well, that was my first ever boyfriend out of college.
Is that what love is going to be like in New York City?
I'm not too sure I want to do this.
So I am just putting a moratorium on relationships across the board.
I am here for like situationships, fun flings, whatever comes my way.
I'm not looking for anything serious.
So I need to table that.
And I also need to relearn what it means to love myself.
Of course, just as Anthony is setting out to prioritize himself as opposed to romantic relationships, he's thrown an unexpected challenge, new possibility.
I have a core group of girl friends and we've known each other since middle school.
Commiserating with them about these, about this particular relationship, one of them, one of my best friends, she tells me like i actually i don't know if you're ready for a relationship just yet, but if i can be honest and this is her speaking to me, if i can be honest, there's this one guy who i work with and i think you guys would hit it off and i think he's really cute.
And i think you think he's cute.
And, as I said, having gotten out of what was a very dark emotional time from that past relationship, I was like yeah, sure.
Anything can be better than that.
I was like, I went through it, so it's whatever.
And then as I say, yeah, sure.
She goes, OK, it's fine.
I was asking, but I already did it anyways.
Anthony waits to hear from this person, who already has his contact info, but nothing happens until it does.
I get a random Facebook friend request and I was like, what?
I'd never get random Facebook friend requests people that I know or something like that, or friends of friends but I've never seen this person in my life.
There's no connection.
And with it was a message to like, Hey, your profile popped up on suggested friends.
And I thought you were really cute.
I was wondering if we could like chat.
I know this is really weird.
I normally don't do this.
I don't reach out to people, but I just wanted to say hello.
Turns out, when Anthony tells his friend about this message, the friend is like wait, this guy Silas, is the dude I was trying to set you up with.
So, Anthony writes back.
I respond to the message like, hey, what's up?
I want to say, like a day or two after that initial contact via Facebook, we have a phone call and we're just having this conversation just to hear each other's voices.
And that phone call leads to an in-person meeting and everything is fine.
There was no catfishing going on, thankfully.
I was actually worried about that, too.
Anthony is still hurt from his last relationship, but he's open-minded.
He decides he wants to go out with this person in a way that's fun for himself.
I decide that if I'm going to search for and experience love, I want to make sure that I do so in my own terms, in a way that feels fun and fulfilling, because all of this is optional.
Anthony's ready to give this a shot.
And games are going to help in a big way.
We'll explain how after the break.
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We're all out of the ordinary.
There's a battle playing out right now over who should control American universities.
We're going to bankrupt these universities.
In season one, we were guessing what was to come.
Now, we know.
We want nothing less than $500 million from Harvard.
From the Boston Globe and on the media, it's season two of The Harvard Plan.
This time, it really is personal.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So Anthony Urena has been set up by a friend.
The guy's name is Silas.
And it's time to plan a first date.
You're going to love this.
We go to a little sushi restaurant, get some food there.
But then right after that, around the corner from the restaurant, is this place called Barcade in New York City.
Barcade is literally a bar with video games in it.
It's got tons of games.
New, old, digital, analog, and even, and maybe especially, Pac-Man.
Anthony was clearly going to waste no time in sharing his love language with a potential partner.
I was proud of myself.
I thought it was a perfect first date idea, where we have dinner and then we get to play games together over a drink.
And in that way I was sort of telling myself that if this relationship, or rather if this first date, goes sour, at the very least I had good food and a really fun time with or without that person involved.
But as luck would have it, we ended up connecting.
I very vividly remember engaging in sort of like a one-on-one matchup with him in one of these fighting games.
And then he beat me a few times.
And I was actually shocked, because I always consider myself really exceptionally good at video games because I've played them for the majority of my life.
And during our first day dinner conversation, he said that yes, he grew up with video games, but he never really liked them that much.
But he beat me.
And I was like, that was very attractive to me.
I was like, oh, a challenge.
I appreciate that.
Challenge accepted.
They hit it off, clearly.
And games follow Anthony and Silas as their relationship grows.
It was in 2016.
I was actually in Philadelphia for a work conference.
And I love Pokemon on the Game Boy.
But in 2016, Pokemon Go was released on smartphones across the world.
And it was a worldwide sensation.
I remember this time, and maybe you do too.
People were wandering around, sometimes right into the road, looking down at their phones, trying to catch Pokemon in the real world.
It was wild.
The whole world was playing this game.
But for me it was a particularly special time because Silas had come visit me while I was away at my work conference.
And he stayed with me in my hotel and the Pokemon game released the day, like the second day of the conference.
So I remember doing my work stuff throughout the day, and then at night...
I was like Hey, why don't we go out and explore Philadelphia together and catch Pokemon along the way?
We had this sort of really beautiful romantic jaunt around town where I remember we were like in the Chinatown part of Philadelphia.
We grabbed some food, grab some bubble tea.
We're catching Pokemon along the way.
We were walking for hours.
We saw all of the major landmarks and I just remember thinking like wow, this is what a healthy relationship looks and feels like.
By 2017, Silas understands that games are Anthony's love language.
My birthday comes around and he gets me a Nintendo Switch.
And that was like, for me, more important than an engagement band.
It's just very much like, wow, you are truly confessing your love to me.
You bought me this gaming console that not only I've been excited about, but you know how important video games are to me, so you understand that this is a core part of my identity.
It's not just that Anthony wants someone to play games with, by the way.
He fully understands that Silas isn't as much of a gamer and doesn't have to be as all-in about it.
But this is about communication and caring and showing someone that you want to connect.
Anthony's trying to do this for Silas, too.
In 2018, Anthony and Silas decide to move in together.
It's Anthony's first time living with a significant other.
They enjoy it.
And Silas seems to know exactly how to make Anthony feel loved.
I remember just sitting there playing these games.
And him, Silas was very anti-horror anything.
He hated scary stuff.
But he loved that I loved horror.
And so he would sit behind me on the couch headphones on not watching the TV but sharing that space with me and playing something on his phone or just scrolling, doing something else, right?
So sharing that bond together that physical space ago is very important.
Um, and that, for me, just cemented like okay, so this is what life is going to be like now.
Once again, video games have seen anthony through a major life change.
He's found love, real love, and this person understands him, but as the relationship progresses, the two of them are missing a very big conversation.
Anthony had dealt with one big breakup before and everything stemmed from the person not ever wanting to be out.
Ironically, years later, Anthony isn't really out all the way either.
He and Silas haven't talked about any of this.
I had been out to friends and colleagues and coworkers for like most of my life after high school, but I was not yet out to family.
I want to say around 2020 or so.
I remember just like sitting in my bedroom and feeling like There's this fire inside of me and I just feel like I'm living two lives inadvertently, where I don't feel fully integrated with the world, because my mother does not yet know, number one, about my sexuality.
But more importantly number two, that there's this person who I could see myself actually living a life with.
You know,
Anthony calls his mother and tells her.
I'm like Hey, I just want to have a quick conversation about something that just has been really heavy on my mind.
Is it okay?
Is now a good time?
Like, yeah, yeah.
What's wrong, baby?
What's happening?
And then I just like stuttered and stumbled out like, mom, I'm gay.
I don't know if you know what that means fully but, like I, just it's been bothering me and it's I've always been this way and it's who I am as part of my identity.
I just never felt really comfortable sharing that.
And I just hope that this is okay.
I don't want to lose you.
It's like typical conversation you might expect in a coming out story and it took my mom some time to accept that.
It took my mom some time to come to terms with it.
Now we're like best friends and was never no issues along the way, and i also learned to give my mother grace, because this was very new for her.
Telling his mother with such courage is huge liberating.
He can't wait to tell silas, And this is when I realized things might not work out perfectly with this particular relationship.
Because Silas tells me, he's like, I'm really happy for you.
I'm really happy that this, that you were able to have that conversation.
And like, I'm so glad that you have such a loving and understanding mother.
He's like, but I hope you know that I'm never going to be able to do that on my end.
And I asked him like, what do you mean by that?
And he says, well, my parents are older.
They had come from a very traditional background where homosexuality is not acceptable in any form whatsoever, especially not public relationships.
And I remember him specifically telling me one time he's like so like I.
He's like I want to spend the rest of my life with you too but honestly, it's probably just going to have to be in secret.
It's like, my parents are just from a different generation and they're dealing with health issues.
And I just rather not approach that subject whatsoever.
And then I say like, oh, okay, I understand.
I know that's a really challenging thing, but I just have a question like in a hypothetical future where let's say we wanna get married or something like that, how's that gonna work out?
And he says like, we're just gonna have to like do it and have a private marriage.
Nobody has to know.
This request for indefinite obscurity did not feel great to Anthony, but he lets it go.
And once again, things start to change.
A pandemic shows up.
He and Silas get through it together.
They keep their routine.
But still, they can't seem to figure out, I'll use game terms here, how to get to the next level.
Especially after the quarantine lockdowns and especially after the weirdness of that conversation about maybe not being on the same terms about our relationship and what he wants and whatnot.
I had been wanting to sort of remedy what I felt was like a falling out heart or a distancing that I started noticing in our bond, especially after the challenges of being in quarantine for so long.
But I noticed that some of the intimacy of our relationship and not talking about sex whatsoever, but I'm talking about those moments where I'd play video games and he'd sit on the couch those started to become few and far in between.
And I started to wonder why.
What's going on here?
Because this was the way that we connected.
But now he would rather be working or just watching TV on his own elsewhere.
Right.
And so I started noticing what felt like a distancing that I thought video games could remedy, because that's, it had been a glue for the longest part in our bond.
And so 2022 rolls around.
I get this game called It Takes Two.
If you're familiar with it.
As you recall, I am familiar with it.
It's the game I talked about at the start of the episode.
Game is this entire metaphor about working through relationship challenges.
And i pick it up and i tell silas like hey, i got this really fun game.
I got a lot of rave reviews, it's winning a ton of awards.
I think you'll really enjoy it.
Let's play it together.
Um, and silas like yeah, you know what, why not, let's do it?
And when we start the game at first, he starts to have some reservations, not because of the story, but because of how challenging the game itself can be.
But after he had worked through that, after that, he can actually start to sit with the story.
And all of a sudden I notice his demeanor changes completely, because this story is dealing very explicitly with stuff about love that might be lost, the sort of bickering that happens in partnerships, larger questions about what do we do about our child, like work stress, all of this stuff.
It's very human.
It's very true to the human condition.
And at one point, he comments like, oh, I don't want to play this anymore.
I'm like, why?
What's wrong?
I was like, is it still too hard?
He's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Like, this game is way too serious.
It's getting way too deep.
I have no interest in following through with this.
I was like, okay.
That's... It was very weird for me.
I didn't know how to process that.
And so at this point, I tapped on one of my best friends, Ethan.
And...
Ethan and I have played video games for a very long time.
We met in graduate school.
And this is very much so a platonic friendship.
But I start playing through this game with him.
And I'm having this conversation.
We're playing online.
He's not physically with me.
He's in his home.
I'm in my home.
And I have a headset on.
And I'm talking to him.
I was like yeah Ethan, you know I actually bought this game, for you know, sort of get closer to Silas.
But he hates it.
He can't get into it.
He's like, what do you mean?
He's like, he's just like, it's not into the story.
It's not any game.
It's like, he's not into the gaming, how it works.
And so it become this thing where Ethan and I would hop on this game and have these sort of impromptu, pseudo therapy sessions where we're focusing on the game and, like our bond, our friendship is deepening because of the challenges we're surmounting together.
But it's also affording me an opportunity to start to just recognize like oh, I'm actually my partner's growing distant from me and I'm coming to terms with that.
And I think I myself too may be growing distant from my partner.
Missing through all of this is Silas, over and over.
Silas hasn't played the game since setting down that controller.
Maybe it set off something too close to home.
In any case, the relationship has changed.
So this is February 2022 where we start playing this game, right?
Fast forward to the fall of 2022.
Ethan and I, both very busy.
We would find time to play the game.
We actually only finished the game last week.
Don't tell me what happened.
No, I will not.
I mean, I kind of can guess, but I don't know.
It's so beautiful, yes.
But because of our work schedules, it took us some time to get through it.
But every single time we've had these sort of like wonderful conversations.
And even I tell people all the time, as quirky as that dude is, his friendship, the intimacy of that friendship clued me into what a healthy relationship in general looks like.
Right.
And so I tell Ethan all the time I was like after well, let me backtrack a little bit, as Ethan and I are playing, fall of 2022 comes into the picture.
And this is when I suddenly become privy to the fact that Silas, despite all of his grand gestures of love and commitment in our relationship, I find out that he was engaged in some infidelity.
And that was really hard for me to come to terms with, because for some reason I had believed in my head that he would never be that type of person.
Given everything that we've gone through together, all of these adventures we've gone on, we travel, all of this stuff.
Why?
Why?
It just felt very out of left field.
And in many ways I don't want to spoil the game, but some of the things that happen in the plot, like I started seeing it, was resonating with things that were happening in my life.
It was shedding new lights and new perspectives on things I had gone through already in that prior relationship.
And this is when I realized like, Oh, this is, we have grown into different people.
We had been together for almost seven years at that point.
And so that distance that I had since was very much so real.
Once I had clarity and affirmation and And I remember feeling scared because this is like again I thought this was my one big love story but then ends up taking a turn that I can't exactly anticipate.
Silas and Anthony decide to break up, but their lease isn't up for another few months.
I decided like, let's just split the apartment in half.
You stay over there, I stay over here and we'll just ride it out and we'll make moves.
After that.
Video games, that self-soothing capacity that they have, it saved me.
It saved me so much.
Coming home, being able to put on the headset, navigating a completely different world apart from my own, but then having active conversations with my support network, my friends, the people who I love and cherish.
That really made me feel that I was not alone in this process.
Thinking back to different eras of your life, How did being a video game person change you?
Apart from the entertainment they offer, I've always been drawn to games that teach you something.
Many of the games I play, such as Destiny 2, for example.
At surface level, it just looks like you have these fun colorful weapons and then you're shooting aliens.
They involve a lot of critical thinking.
There's a whole genre of games that are called Souls-like, because they are intentionally very difficult.
And the sort of motto of these games is that things are challenging.
But just because something is challenging doesn't mean it's impossible.
You can still show up and work it out.
I remember applying for a grant for my research that I got denied and rejected a few times.
But then eventually, after many edits, I got that grant down the road.
And when I was doing those rewrites and those edits, I kept thinking about dark souls and how there was this one boss that took me an entire month to beat because I just had to get good.
I just had to figure out the strategy.
It taught me resilience and perseverance.
And so I've always.
I guess I wouldn't say what is.
I would say that the video games themselves help nurture these inherent qualities, this sort of sense of perseverance and this resolve to just never give up, this will to succeed despite all costs.
Anthony and Silas parted ways in 2022.
Anthony is now single and looking with no pressure.
Anthony put me on the spot by asking me to consider what work I'm doing to improve the gaming experience for my playing partner, because I suck at games and I guess I could practice.
And if I practiced, it would be more fun for both of us.
I guess this means for me it's time to practice, to improve, to learn to get camera perspective so I can go from beating a pack of squirrels to finally escaping a room full of marbles.
Maybe games are more than we think they are.
Perhaps in their evolution they have become supportive reflective, more than just pictures on a screen.
And perhaps by playing them we can become more aware of ourselves, of our partners and of the world around us.
Ready, player one.
Love Letters is a production of the Boston Globe.
Our producer is Christine Ahonotu.
Our executive producer is Kristin Nelson.
Uzair Ahmed does our audio mixing and mastering.
Sound design by Christine Ahonotu.
Maddie Mortel is our audience engagement manager.
Special thanks to Nancy Barnes and Linda Henry.
Our music is from APM.
Remember, Love Letters is also an advice column.
Send any questions about dating divorce marriage singlehood whatever, to loveletters at bostoncom.
And if you like this show, please leave us a review.
Learn more at loveletters.show.
I liked the squirrel mafia and I was really into that.
And I was able to share with my significant other.
I might be attracted to that squirrel.
I don't know.
It's like a very like self-assured squirrel.
But anyway.
I'm Meredith Goldstein.
Thanks for listening.
