I like to say that the couple that games together, stays together. Iām not alone in that sentiment, either. Iām sure there are tons of couples who integrate gaming into their day-to-day interactions and manage to get along just fine.
But just because I like to say itā¦ well, that doesnāt make the statement true. Unfortunately, I only know this through first-hand experience.
My husband and I met online, like a lot of people do these days, and he liked to say that he fell in love with me on that very first date.
I have a habit of hiding behind a gaming handheld when Iām really nervous with someone new. It wasnāt long into that first meeting when I dug into my purse. I pulled out my Nintendo DS, and just kind of fell into it for a couple of minutes before closing it and going back to him. He swears that that moment, right there, was the moment he fell in love with me.
I still donāt know what he saw in me at that moment. Was my nervousness merely indicative of the sort of unshaped person he was looking for? Did it make me look more submissive, perhaps? Maybe he just wanted someone who played more games than he did. I havenāt really gotten an answer, and thatās okay. Iām not looking for answers these days.
***
This year, we separated, and the divorce process has yet to really get underway, despite the fact that weāre both pretty happy with other people at this point. What I realized most recently about our separation is that the way we played together this year said a lot about where we were in our relationship.
Two games managed to show me it was all over. There wouldnāt be any turning back. No rolling a new character for a fresh start, no āmaybe Iād be a lot happier in this marriage on āVery Easy.'ā These games, which were very different from one another, werenāt the problem, but they were certainly illustrative.
I wasnāt an idiot. I knew when the snowball started rolling down the hill. After one of our (increasingly common) serious talks that left me bawling, I told my husband that we needed some time to ourselves. We needed a couple of hours away from the distractions (read: other people) just to see if there was anything to salvage. I wanted to make it a weekly thing, even.
I wanted counseling. He said no. So, us being us (or perhaps me just being me), we picked a recent downloadable PlayStation 3 release to play together.
Okay, so I wasnāt an idiot then, but I sure was stupid to think that a couple of hours was going to do a lot for us. Maybe hope kills brain cells.
I wanted counseling. He said no. So, us being us (or perhaps me just being me), we picked a recent downloadable PlayStation 3 release to play togetherāThe Simpsons Arcade. Heād played it a lot as a kid, since he could visit an arcade on a semi-regular basis. I hadnāt ever managed to play it before, but the show, as well as the gameās genre, are among my favorites. The best part (to me, for this occasion) was that it was all co-op. No fighting each other allowed, only working together.
In a sense, going back to this kind of game was the perfect thing to do. We were going back to basics, trying to figure out the essence of āus,ā whether that was particularly painful or not.
Here, the pain was minimal. We actually finished the game in about half the time that was allotted in our schedules, but we didnāt want to go back and do it again so soon, so we perused the menus and that was really justā¦ it.
I donāt think playing something together really āworked,ā but then again, I donāt know what I expected. We came, we played, we went back to our (increasingly separate) lives. Honestly, we never even spoke about the nothing that happened again.
And playing together weekly never happened, either. That time would be the next-to-last.
The absolute last time we played a game together was the Diablo III launch. Heād been waiting the better part of a decade for this game and Iād only been waiting the better part of a year. The way he talked of high school LAN parties made its predecessor sound like the ultimate in companionship gaming. Bonds were forged, and loot was had. I wanted in on this.
I got my chance during the gameās press preview for the beta. I could finally get a real sense of what the game was like (and find out just how well it would run on my MacBook Pro). I installed the game and started playing while my husband watched, and man, itās like something was just weird in that room all of a sudden.
I didnāt deserve to play, he said. Mostly because of the fact that Iād never touched a Diablo game in my life. Does that really compute? Iām not sure. I offered him my computer and told him about that last open beta push before the gameās release, but I donāt know if he ever went for it.
I didnāt deserve to play, he said. Mostly because of the fact that Iād never touched a Diablo game in my life.
In any case, we finally made it to release night, and after his late-night gym excursion, which could bring him home well after midnight most nights at the time, we booted up, avoided error messages (perhaps due to blessings from Deckard Cain himself), and went for it.
I made my gal a Demon Hunter named Ariadne (named after my similarly-classed WoW toon), he got started with a Barbarian, and off we went.
Since Iād already done all of this before, I was directing things pretty well, but trying not to be too overbearing about it. It was, in my opinion, so, so cute to see my husband so excited about exploring New Tristram. We went on for about an hour, and then it happened.
He let me die.
In co-op, enemies scale with you and the size of your group. When Iād played before, there wasnāt much of a problem (with the exception of that damn Skeleton King) because my enemies were scaled for a single-player game.
So, here we are, fighting our way through the very beginning of Act I and we separate and all of a sudden I manage to aggro everything in a pretty large radius and I donāt know how that happened and theyāre attacking and oh my god sweetie I donāt wanna die hey can you help me theyāre killing me um seriously can you help because I canāt get range and Iām mostly good for range attacks andā¦ dead.
He let me die. In a room where we would often simultaneously play our respective MMOs with chairs sitting literally next to one another and desks that were touching, he let me die.
With me verbally asking for help, he still let me die.
Yes, itās just a game. Yes, I could come right back to life and keep going (and I did). But I still cried that night before I went to bed because he. Let. Me. Die.
While Ariadne came back again, prepared to handle the onslaught alone, part of me didnāt. We were over.
Yes, he was wearing headphones, but he heard me. I confirmed as much later, when we were done for the night. Oh, āitās just how you play,ā he said. Oh, so it was normal to ignore your partner. Itās just ānormalā to not even deviate from your loot-grabbing activities to save your wife from monsters. I gotcha. (Except everyone Iāve ever told this story to who has any Diablo experience is always as shocked as I was.)
I guess itās too much to expect āātil death do you partā to extend to the virtual world, to avatars that arenāt even programmed to express the sentiments behind such vows.
While Ariadne came back again, prepared to handle the onslaught alone, part of me didnāt. We were over. Really over, and nothing could save us. It wasnāt until after this moment, though, that I really accepted that as fact. It wasnāt just that He Let Me Die, itās that he was so nonchalant about it, even while tears ran down my face.
I left our home the next week. Iāve spent the majority of this year in the kind of depression that you really only seem to get after someone very close to you dies and thereās nothing left to take its place. Once I left, things got better, but Iāve really only been replacing one kind of sad with another.
***
There is a spark in my life, thankfully. If there wasnāt, I probably wouldnāt have made it to today, to be honest. I have a boyfriend now (and Iāve had him for over a year now, so you do that mathāIām a cheating cheater (my husband had been, too), and while that isnāt the only thing that made us fall to pieces, it certainly is among the reasons).
Iām not like Patricia Hernandez, who wrote not too long ago that she just plain doesnāt list gaming as a thing sheās into on her OkCupid profile anymore. Itās there, itās something Iām open to talking about, but if youāre creepy as hell about it, Iām just going to ignore you. My guyā¦ heās not a gamer. Not in the traditional sense, anyway. Heās pretty āmehā about most games these days, despite still fitting in the occasional Age of Empires game (and this is the very first version of the game). He has a Wii, but who doesnāt? The thingās ubiquitous.
Iām a Portal maniac. I love GLaDOSā acerbic humor more than almost any game character as a whole. She may be what amounts to a sentient operating system, but still, my point stands. Best character. Oh, and the part of Portal where you play with portals is pretty good, too.
So I knew Portal 2 pretty well by this point. Hell, after my town was flattened by a tornado and I used the game as a bit of a way to return normalcy to my life, I wrote to the gameās co-writer, Erik Wolpaw, to thank him. (His response was to say thank you, ābut you didnāt actually say the game was any good.ā For the record, sir, itās excellent.) I had been through the co-op campaign with someone else, but I didnāt know it like the back of my hand yet.
We stumbled, together, through it again. What struck me most was the fact that this time, it felt truly cooperative. My first partner, to whom Iād lost my co-op virginity (gasp!) was smart enough and well-versed in game design, so if we were stuck, he almost always figured it out. When I tried to play with my husband, it fizzled out after about a half-hour, because the portal mechanic just isnāt his thing. I get that. (Sort of.) Also, I donāt think he liked taking too many directions from me. (Itās possible that this theme may have existed for a while.)
You know, he and I hadnāt even met in person yet. But here we were, handing off edgeless cubes and hitting buttons and being willing to try things even if they donāt work. I was able to actually teach him some things about the gameāno, you canāt carry things through the emancipation gridsāand, as a bonus, the game did feature voice chat. So it was a fantastic Skype replacement, too.
Here we were, handing off edgeless cubes and hitting buttons and being willing to try things even if they donāt workā¦ Playing with him just felt right
Playing with him just felt right. I donāt know how else to explain it. Maybe I should just say it was like having the knowledge that thereās someone out there in the universe who just understands you. Maybe this means more to me as a woman, but if things werenāt clear, he would wait for me to explain them and ask questions until he completely understood whatever task was at hand. Like, oh my god. Dream guy.
It wasnāt long after that first play session before he decided to ask me something. This something was prefaced as a āweirdā something, so I wasnāt quite sure what to expect.
He wanted to know if I would have his children.
And perhaps this sounds stupid, or like an uninformed product of lust and at-the-time completely unfulfilled sexual tension, but Iā¦ uh, I said yes.
I said yes not just because I love him, but because while we were playing, I literally had the thought, āHuh, this feels like real teamwork. I honestly think I could have kids with this guy if this is how well we interact.ā
Itāll be quite a while before I have to live up to any of that, sure. That is, if both us as a couple and the plans for everything that happens before kids shake out. But over time, Iāve felt like a gameāa silly game about screwing with physicsāis really a better litmus test for relationships, having children with someone, and other serious endeavors than anything else Iāve encountered (you know, aside from actually doing any of these things). Itās puzzling, challenging, and occasionally you just want to throw up your hands and give up. All of that sounds like parenthood to me. Except for the part of parenthood where you donāt get to sleep. I hear thatās a thing.
Ultimately, I think we can learn something about ourselves and our relationships with others when we take the time to play with other people instead of against them. Maybe you donāt always like what you see, sure, but itās worth the effort. Howās that competitive personality going to work out with another person? Are you the sort who gives up control too easily on a shared screen? Does that translate to you giving up control in your life? Itās something to examine, for sure.
As for me, wellā¦ Iām ready to learn some more about the people I love. Just as long as it doesnāt involve Diablo III. That one still hurts a little.
Tiffany Claiborne is the former news editor at GamingAngels.com. You can reach her on Twitter at @kweenie, or by email at [emailĀ protected].
