If you have been With your partner long enough, you don’t even have to hear them clear their throats before you know they’re about to speak. After I clicked Halo: Master Chief Collection and waiting for it to install on my PC, I noticed a stillness in the air. I looked up and saw my husband looking at me with concern. “On a sunny day in Berkeley, I played this game for eight hours straight,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I was there.”
I did not it’s correct there, of course. I was in the next room, becoming more and more resistant. If you’re of a certain age, it’s impossible that you don’t know about Halo. Halo is the Xbox killer app, a totally immersive first person shooter with great gameplay in an immersive world. It spawned sequels, franchises, even a TV show.
Even if you don’t know anything about video games, you already know about Halo. Did you know about Halo even if you’re special did not want to know anything about Halo. My entire single life lasted eight years Halo has prevailed. Halo is my enemy. I hate Halo like how Taylor Swift hates celebrity cheerleaders. Halo was the game that almost made me and my now husband break up.
If you live, or have lived, or been close to, a gamer who is not a gamer, you probably know what it’s like to see a game as your enemy. Maybe it’s Halo or Gears of War. Today, it could be Fortnite or Apex Legends. The easy thing to do here is to write from the perspective of an unfairly treated partner. While there is some debate as to whether video game addiction is real mental illnessMost people who study it agree that the game’s compulsive allure is cause for concern.
It will also be easy to write about toxicity in gaming keep women away. I’m not arguing that this exists, but it’s not a factor for me. Both now and then, my husband and his friends went out of their way to encourage me to participate.
In a shameful irony, gaming has become one of the main ways that my husband and I now spend time together. 17 years after I issued a passionate ultimatum that he was simply had to stop the game a lot, I’ve finally discovered that it’s fun to have a hobby that we both can enjoy together at home. Before we had kids (and the global pandemic), we might have gone hiking or mountain biking together. Now we log in after the kids are already in bed screaming, “Fuck, fuck, fucker!” at each other.
Both my husband and everyone who knew me, asked me what took me so long. 17 years after the truth, it’s hard to figure out why I can’t play football. As best I could figure it out, here’s what stopped me:
Playing the game is physically difficult. Gaming requires an amazing amount of fine motor control. If you’ve been playing video games all your life, you probably don’t even found that the joystick moves and presses the buttons to coordinate movement, shooting, and camera angle simultaneously is difficult. If you don’t own a gaming console yourself, you can hardly ask for a turn to practice.
