Were any of them actually close friends with you?

Only a few of the more quiet ones, since I was the unpopular nerdy bullied guy the rest of them didn't really want to be seen talking to. Later on as my bully dropped out in 8th grade, I gained a lot of confidence and got closer to the others too.

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

I mean yes, that's all true, stigma and all, I'm just saying that over here in particular, it was mostly the girls who'd ridicule gaming as a childish hobby (especially if you played Runescape which was seen as particularly childish for some reason), which I've since found out is not common everywhere (and in fact of the people I know who still play Runescape, half are women. They're just all from other towns/cities).

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime.

I wouldn't say it's that obvious. I know plenty who have played it very casually, but not many who have gotten that deep into it. It was like one of the default games everyone dabbled in as a kid. And yes, I know you can spend thousands of hours in it. I've got a couple hundred in it myself over the years (have played 1, 3, 4 and Medieval). I would doubt most got that deep into it back then. For one, that would require understanding the language the game was in, which most didn't. Like 5 kids out of 25 in our class understood the language. I sometimes made money doing important Runescape quests (like Lost City or Monkey Madness to unlock dragon longsword and dragon scimmy) for others because they couldn't do it themselves.

hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I on the other hand don't think I know anyone who's spent a cent on it. Estonia wasn't particularly rich in the mid 00s, so we pirated games. If you didn't know how to, you knew someone else who did. Most kids had older siblings or friends who'd help. This has carried on. I've bought many games over the years now, but never The Sims. Always pirated that.