Forbidden Love Triangle

In this post, I will discuss the Blogs of the Round Table theme for November: The Family That Plays Together.

This month’s Round Table invites us to talk about our families today and the role that playing games has in our relationships with them. Whether you play video games with your children before bed, card games with your parents on the holidays, continue to meet up with your siblings for regular death matches, play couch co-op with your spouse, or argue with them all about your World of Warcraft addiction–this month’s topic is on the importance, or impact, that gaming has on your family relationships.

I have a forbidden love triangle with gaming and my wife. The relationship is fraught with drama, but also fulfilling in a myriad of ways. I try to remember what my father has taught me: that I must always place my marriage above any other relationships.

I only wish her father had taught her the same thing.

My wife was totally against this love triangle before we met. She was involved previously with someone who decided to run off with gaming and leave her behind to savor the vacuum any obsessive gamer leaves in his wake. I had to use subtle methods to draw her into a productive understanding of my habit.

My strategy was to get her addicted as well.

I started her out with adventure games after a one-night stand with Halo 2 that ended with her twirling around in circles looking at the ceiling while Halo veterans screamed “n00b” and “easy kill!” into their Xbox headsets. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

The idea was to play adventure games together from beginning to end, as a bonding experience that would bring wife, husband and gaming together in blissful union. Unfortunately, once she got started, I usually ended up returning home after a Saturday shift at work to find that she had already completed the game we selected for that week. Puzzles that had stumped me for days when I attempted them in my youth were deciphered by her in minutes and she decided on an all-time best after conquering my library: Day of the Tentacle. How could this be? A game that actually requires the player to click on verbs before interacting with the scene won over her heart before “high-tech epics” like The Longest Journey and Grim Fandango? But I laid my confusion aside and celebrated victory.

The next step was the purchase of a DS for my wife. A gaming platform of her very own. She scoffed, “You’ll end up playing it more than I do.” But she devoured Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, Mario 64, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, and Brain Age. Now I can’t get her to stop playing Professor Layton for long enough to stick The World Ends With You into her DS and start a game. If I happen to find the thick, blue DS lying around unattended, as soon as I touch it she warns me that her game is in progress and not saved, but I can’t save it for her because I might mess it up.

She helped me beat Braid and Portal, though she won’t pick up the 360 controller, and Super Mario Galaxy and Wii Sports are favorites. We’ve even approached the point in our relationship with gaming that I must ignore the hypocrisy I see when she claims I’m ignoring her as I play Fallout 3 or No More Heroes. She doesn’t seem to realize that I could be drowning in my own bathwater while she decodes one of the secret enigmas in the Curious Village and she wouldn’t bat an eye unless it was a math puzzle she needed my help on. Sometimes, in a relationship, these imparities are better left unmentioned.

What once was a pastime I could enjoy with the satisfaction that she would be overwhelmed by the constant stream of geek that emerged from my mouth when I described it has now become a power struggle that I find myself losing by a landslide. It’s a tug-of-war with gaming in the middle and my wife’s arms are bulging while I’m dragged closer to the center line. One day I’ll wake up and the Nintendo products will be gone from our home. My wife and gaming will have moved on to a place where they can develop their flowering relationship alone–without my distraction.