I've enjoyed messing around with this new version of Xfire over the past handful of months. I was a frequent user in the late 2000s, logging several hundred hours in some of my favorite online games like Halo Custom Edition, Jedi Academy and Guild Wars, among countless others. The social element of Xfire pushed me to discover games I probably wouldn't have tried on my own and connected me with other like-minded players, with at least one encounter turning into a decades-long friendship.

There's a psychological component to the act of logging game hours. Watching the numbers go up and competing for time between different titles is like an overarching meta-game in a certain way. The phenomenon was as true back then as it is now, at least for me. I gravitated toward using Steam more often in my early twenties as Xfire started to fall off and digital game sales became more in vogue. Steam filled a similar niche to Xfire and opened up an even greater world of possibilities I wasn't full...