Slashdot Mirror
Playing Games While Not Ruining Your Relationship?
Silicon Mike asks: "A nice sized group of us here at work recently picked up City of Heroes, and started playing together. While all of us were gamers to some extent, now we're all pretty addicted and want to play together online all the time. The problem some of us are running into is that our significant others aren't too happy with us gaming all the time. Other then the two obvious solutions (quit playing or dump the significant other) I'm wondering how other people have deal with it? I tried installing Zoo Tycoon on my other computer and saying 'Look honey, cute bears' but she just didn't bite."
The secret is to find something they like playing. It won't neccessarily be obvious either.
My wife turned her nose up at the cute fluffy games that I thought she would like. At first blush I thought perhaps computer games were not going to be something she would like. Then she saw me playing Quake3 Arena one day and has become quite adept at it.
Most importantly is to talk about your game playing habits. Find out why it is a problem for them. This will prevent countless hours of arguing and pouting (on both parts!).
If the problem is "just" because your chores are suffering, then the solution may be as easy as finishing your chores quicker; not finding a game for her so you can say "You play too!".
Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor - Ovidius
A little over a year ago, my wife and I had a baby. She takes up the majority of my time now, but my wife and I made an agreement that we'd each get one night a week to ourselves. I typically play EQ (yes still addicted after 4 and 1/2 years) on my night, and she plays Quake 3 on hers.
Even with other things: I hate doing laundry, and she hates to cook. So I cook and she does the laundry (mostly because I'm a much better cook though).
It is all about compromise, but as long as you can both come to an agreement that works it would be an issue.
-i
I used to dream of finding a girl who loved playing video games as much as I did. Ironically I have found myself in a healthy relationship with a girl who hates video games and I don't want it any other way. Slowly she has learned to respect my pastime as a way for me to escape, and slowly I have realized that the non-interactive nature of video games isn't as satisfying as a good conversation with someone. As a result I find myself not needing the video games like I once did and happy about it.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
Yeah, that's what I did. Met her on a MUD actually :P, and now we move on to MMO's and whatnot and are both nice and geeky.
:P
Ah yes...I believe normal people do things like take walks, for us it's "maybe we can fit another mission in before bedtime!"
I feel so pathetic...and yet wonderful.
So my suggestion to the slashdot crowd is to meet girls ON the games...but then...they aren't always girls
Well, even not just for playing with one's family. Some of us actually _like_ cooperative play far more than all-out cut-throat shoot-in-the-back competition. Not just to appease the SO or whatever, but just for what it is.
As someone else put it: if I thought all-out cut-throat back-stabbing competition was fun, I'd have went to business school.
As early as the text-based MUD's it was known that you basically get 4 types of players:
- socializers (like to talk and interact with other players)
- achievers (want to have the biggest score)
- explorers (not just exploring geography, but also every bit of game mechanics)
- killers (basically hostile to other players. Not just competing for the highest frag count, like an achiever would, but actually wanting to annoy, humiliate, keep others from playing, etc.)
See Bartle's paper for more detail.
And it baffles me that most games catter either to killer-achievers or plain old killers, but pretty much every single non-MMO online game thoroughly ignores the other three categories. Pretty much every single multiplayer game nowadays is about playing _against_ other players, and not together with them.
It's not even a new problem. Even aside from Bartle's paper, there have been countless articles and flame-wars on MUD boards, explaining that some people explicitly do _not_ want to play _against_ other players. And why.
But no, every new multiplayer game just _has_ to catter to the same overcrowded market segment, and ignore everyone else.
This industry truly baffles me.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.