Slashdot Mirror
Gaming vs Relationships
bgalbraith writes "BBC News has posted an editorial piece called Confessions of a Game Widow, where a frustrated spouse writes about getting neglected by her partner in favor of games such as Halo 2 and Half-Life 2. Her solution to all those like her: 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Let's get together and form a clan. We can call ourselves the Game Widows.'"
This would make such an awesome episode of "Desparate Housewives". I'd be riveted to my seat.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
To know "Daddy" as "the man who snarls at you when you want to play PlayStation" rather than a father figure, well, it really puts a somber image on things. If you'd rather raise your online char than raise your son/daughter, then the child might as well be missing one parent.
Just interesting to see the shoe on the other foot, when the addiction applies to the parents. Much more serious when you think about it.
It sounds like you thirst a relationship more than you really understand them. Even if 'Half-Life' or 'Halo' don't get trapped by the assumption that it's the gamer's fault. Despite the fact that I made 3 times as much money as my wife, allowing her a pretty decent quality of life, she looked down on me for playing as if I was a child. We did things 'out' all the time and I spent a lot of time with her. She was too immature and it was a mistake to take a relationship so far with someone like this. I'll always care for her, but I'm glad to be out of it. If she didn't want to bother trying to understand who i REALLY was (not some little kid) in favor of her prejudices that's her problem. Video games are a perfectly valid and respectable hobby. Like anything, people can get addicted. I may have played video games as a hobby but she watched televisions ALL DAY ALL THE TIME. Talk about a ludicrous double standard.
I'd rather entertain my hobby than sit around spending time with my woman watching tv all day. And I doubt many would disagree unless they simply havn't been in a relationship =P
Some time people have to go with the age old advice:
,in a last ditch effort to save myself in starcraft.
If you can't beat them join them.
My story isn't exaclty like that. But my wife grew up in a household where to this day there is an old NES sitting in the corner of the house(which I have been begging for so I can either repair it or mod it). And thats as far as gaming will get in that house. However after getting married I introduced my wife to a lovely SNES game call "Harvest Moon" this game was so simple to play and allowed her to get started. Eventually we started playing starcraft then Diablo 2. Now I am trying to get her to play City of Heros with me. For us there was two main reasons why she started playing games:
1. She loved me and wanted to spend time with me.
2. I was willing to teach her.
Since then things go great. She doesn't play games as much as I do. But we can if we whenever we want to. And I don't have to worry about her complaning about how its not fair since she doesn't know how to play.
---Althought I have never be able to live down the time I had Mind Controlled most of her battle crusiers
Boy was the couch comfortable that night!
sometimes it's not even so much the game as the passtime. i heard and older woman comment that getting together to play video games are to the younger generation what getting together for poker night was for an older generation. i'm not surprised that transcends to poker widows.
i told her she was +5 insightful, and then she just stared at me blankly.
I'm about to become a gamer widow. If the son of a bitch kills me one more time during co-op Halo 2, I'm gonna fucking kill him (having a warthog dropped on me was funny the first time... maybe). :p
That being said, my significant other and I actually share most hobbies and interests with each other... geek stuff, gaming, etc. But we also have individual interests too and respect them. I'm very much floored when I see people who are demanding and expect a person to completely modify themselves to be with them. Or issue ultimatums or threats to effect such change, rather than loving the person and accepting them for who they are.
I do admit I think women are worse than men about this. Granted, I do spend all my time with my significant other... we have other friends too, but we are best friends, we have many compatible interests... and we were together getting Halo 2 midnight when it was released. We even have most of the same friends, so really we are together almost all the time. Some people might think it's excessive. But then again, many of those people are the ones who don't have much in common with their own SO's and criticize each others hobbies. Then again, what works for one relationship doesn't work for another. Everyone's different... but I think not laying a foundation for your SO to resent you should be a universal thread of all successful relationships.
I'm a non-Christian who backs the rhetoric, up to a point: staying in a destructive relationship doesn't help anyone, but the data shows rather strongly that children of single parents of the opposite gender are far more likely to run into difficulties: a single mother raising a boy, or a single father raising a girl, is a situation which predicts for high-risk and destructive behavior more than income, education level, or even an "unhappy" marriage.
Data in general suggests that, even barring that, children are better off in a non-abusive 2-parent household (even if there's an absence of inter-parental affection) than in a single parent household.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and when it comes to the benefits of a two-parent household, I think the Christians and the social conservatives may be right on this one.