Hating the Player and the Game

Does your partner play video games? And your kids too? Why do we hate it so much?

Photo by Sam Pak on Unsplash

I’ve written previously about football culture and its many pros and cons from the vantage point of a woman with minus zero interest in either team sports or meat pies. Gaming in so many ways reflects similar themes but is distinct enough for my inbox to be full to the brim any time I mention the omnipresence of the console in my life. ‘How do you cope with the gaming?’, ‘Can you please write about gaming.’ Honestly, it’s one of the niche points of connection that I have with other women on the internet—all due to the power of those handsets plugged into the back of the telly.

I live in a home replete with women’s touches. Wallpaper with foliage snaking up decorative stems, tactile bouclé and a palette of pale rose and eau de nil. The loo paper even has scalloped perforations ffs. However, the sound, smell and general sensory environment when I’m in familial company is all masculine. It is rowdy and energetic as well as casual and unrefined. Table manners are my life’s work here. And one of the biggest facets of this mood calibration is the amount of gaming that goes on under my roof.

Many of my chic friends and fashion industry peers look at me blankly when I mention how much my husband, his friends, my brother and sons play video games. Married as they are to traditional adults (note here that I am not simply describing them as adults), they have never in their grown-up lives as wives and girlfriends experienced gaming culture. Needless to say, they would never consider gaming themselves, even though recent estimates suggest that 47% of gamers in the U.K. are female.

My husband plays, or else would like to play, some kind of computer game every evening. When he gets a new game that he’s deeply engaged in, it’s more like he borderline disappears. His gameplay however, pales in comparison to my brother’s - he takes his annual leave dependent on game release dates (so he can more fully apply himself to Final Fantasy VII et al). They love to game together and now, of course, my sons, the youngest of whom is four, are totally captivated too. When we have male friends over for dinner or even an afternoon BBQ, at some point the Switch will go on. Or the Playstation. There are so many gaming boxes in our TV cupboard that I honestly don’t even know what they’re called. Sometimes it’s handheld games, most often it’s on the TV.