Remote bonding with sister

October 3, 2018 2:29 AM

I'm living pretty much permanently overseas and want to play games or watch stuff with my sister via the internet while gabbing. Do you know good options?

Howdy all! I live in Japan. My sister is in the US. Since we were kids, we had a lot of fun playing games together and watching TV. It would be nice if we could have a online date when we're both awake where we could play a game together or watch tv together (and chat, as in voice). What are some options for making that happen?

Games
I'm on Steam, and I think sister is as well. First person shooter games are never happening. She does World of Warcraft but I don't want to start playing that. We grew up on adventure clicky games like Myst and Amber: Journeys Beyond. I recently liked Tiny Bang Story, Kentucky Route Zero, Grim Fandango. Games like these usually don't take more than one player. If we were in the same room, we could take turns, but we are an ocean away? What to do? I'd even be open to just watching my sister play whatever it was/vice versa.

TV
My sister has some streaming services and I could probably get Japanese Netflix. How do you chat with remote people while watching the same stuff? Some kind of screen sharing deal? Start "play" at exactly the same time and use Facetime or whatnot?

Thanks all.

posted by sacchan to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (9 answers total)

Not Steam, and I'm not sure of the setup that would now be needed but I used to play Minecraft on the same server as my niece when I was in Argentina and she was in the UK. With a Skype session at the same time for chatting.

I think Realms would allow to do the same thing, although there is a monthly subscription cost.
posted by jontyjago at 3:03 AM on October 3, 2018

For TV and the like, your best bet is rabb.it. You both create accounts, then log in and go into one of your rooms. The rooms have integrated chat, and have optional audio/video chat, as well. Then, within the room, you launch a browser, log into whatever service you're streaming something from, and start watching it. The video plays in your room, which streams it to both of you at the same time.

It has occasional problems, but I'm in a long-distance relationship and have been using it happily for a couple years now. It's really easy, and for the most part, it just works.

You'll want something like Discord to talk to each other while you play games, as many games have poor-to-middling in-game chat options. Discord has a small footprint and is designed to be used while you play games, though I use it for everything.

Re: Games: Look for things that support remote co-op or remote multiplayer. It's fairly easy to find board games that support this--Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan do this, as do many other games. There are lots of options that aren't first-person shooters--Stardew Valley, widely beloved and largely nonviolent, supports two-person play, now; Don't Starve has a multiplayer mode that's almost entirely customizable so you can have none enemies, if you'd like. Battleblock Theatre is a little platformer that reminds me of playing oldschool Nintendo games with a friend. Terraria and Starbound are multiplayer exploratory-type games. This isn't an exhaustive sampling, btw, it's just thing that I personally have played recently. There are thousands of options, and pretty much anything that offers multiplayer through Steam is a possibility for you.
posted by mishafletch at 3:04 AM on October 3, 2018 [7 favorites]

My remote buddy and I play hearthstone together while skyping. Because it’s a card game it leaves plenty of time to chat, and it’s free, colorful and simple enough to get started with even if you aren’t familiar with collectible card games.
posted by acanthous at 4:18 AM on October 3, 2018

Discord is a good choice for communication. It has decent voice chat and there’s a client for pretty much every platform under the sun. You can create your own private server that’ll last until you explicitly delete it.

It even supports screen sharing so you might be able to watch something on Netflix if it allows that sort of thing.
posted by Gev at 4:51 AM on October 3, 2018

Given the type of games you like and grew up on, I'd also recommend The Witness. It's not two-player, but I think it would be a very enjoyable game to play simultaneously. There is hardly any audio, no script to follow, and the pace is extremely relaxed. The map is quite small and it's very easy to describe where you are. Its puzzles often benefit from having a second opinion handy, or tag-team efforts at solving them.
posted by snarfois at 5:43 AM on October 3, 2018

The r/LongDistance subreddit has a lot of great posts with tools and suggestions for shows/games that people can watch/play/share together online.
posted by Jairus at 5:54 AM on October 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

I have found the new Stardew Valley multiplayer an extremely pleasant way to hang out with someone remotely, since you are kind of just running around together doing errands. If you use Steam's voice chat feature, you can chat about what you're doing together in the game, and it's low-key enough that you can also just chat about life stuff too.
posted by ITheCosmos at 7:18 AM on October 3, 2018 [1 favorite]

My friends and I sometimes play the Jackbox online party games remotely. The gameplay is all online and we use various video chat services to handle seeing each other and voice. They're best with more people so you could use it to also meet each other's friends.
posted by Candleman at 8:02 AM on October 3, 2018

Response by poster: We’re having a great time playing Witcher using Discord. She plays, I am the peanut gallery.
posted by sacchan at 6:27 AM on April 19, 2019