For me personally it'd just be lanning at friends houses with anywhere from 2-12 people back in early highschool, we'd play games like counter-strike(pre-steam), starcraft (and later wc3) UMS/custom maps, soldat, unreal tournament vanilla, worms and diablo 2 and be up for 24 hours straight just gaming for the love of gaming. There was very little competitive nature to it, everyone constantly laughing/having fun, going through slabs of disgustingly warm coke each... Competitive gaming will never be as much fun as I had when we would play CS_Italy and I'd "team-down" with an auto-shotty (because I actually thought it was the best gun in the game), or when me and my friends would finally beat a team tower defense we'd been playing for 2 hours.
edit; but I guess this is kind of the opposite of the stories you were hoping to hear... But this is just what comes to mind from someone who's been 'competitively gaming' now for like 6+ years across like 5 different games. I envy the bronze-gold newbies who have no idea about any of the competitive scene and just play 4v4 all day laughing/talking shit the whole time.
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