Spousal aggro: What to do when your better half wants you to stop playing video games

You stretch and dislodge your arm from a softly snoring blanket and make your way into the bathroom for your Saturday morning routine. The answering machine blinks at you in such a fashion that you are quite aware that the office called and wants you in for work, despite the overtime that you worked all week. You hear, in the background, your mother-in-law stirring in the guest room and the coarse smoker’s cough that kept you up all night ever since she came to visit your spouse. You aren’t incredibly stressed, but killing something would sure hit the spot better than the slightly vinegary bacon that you somehow forced down for breakfast. It is this state in which you sit, controller in hand, contemplating whether zombie flesh is considered human or a hybrid of such, and, if that is the case, if your character could in fact sustain themselves for days on it.

And then your spouse wakes up, plops themselves down on the couch next to you, and as they reach over to grab the remote and switch to morning news your mother-in-law sits on your other side and comments on how you spend too much time playing games and not enough time keeping the guest room clean. This elicits similar remarks from your spouse who takes the control from your hands and replaces it with an un-ironed, worn shirt and explains that they checked your messages and that Bob from accounting wants you in. The feeling of helplessness may pervade your life.

This situation, in fact, resembles many other situations that share the same basic grounds: you aren’t getting what you want because people don’t understand you. Let us try to explain why we need games in our lives then, and make associations to what the fairer sex might understand.

First of all, the conception of games as a waste of time is a very old and still unproven rhetoric. Your grandfather probably sat down next to your father and told him that if he played that mindless game of pong all his life he was going to end up a scoundrel. Better for him to be off learning how to smoke and drink at the same time. In fact, your grandfather could bench-press a whole cow and Uncle Arnie would attest to that. Why, back in the day Ah yes, the rhetoric. Really, what is gaming? Entertainment, and that’s a simple fact. The US census in 2004 found that adults spent on average 1669 hours watching TV in 2004, the equivalent of 70 full days. How much is spent on the movie industry every year? I don’t have exact numbers, but seeing as the Governator practically bought California with his earnings alone, I think it does fairly well. Sports? Professional athletes quickly follow movie stars in the richest people in the world. Theatre, opera, concerts I’m sure your spouse follows one of these. Video games are not a whole different category here; they’re just as much a waste of time as crocheting yet another rug (Take that, grandma).

So the best advice I can offer to those of your still under the sway of your significant other is this: grow some, explain to her the paragraph mentioned above, and sit down and play some games. A little disclaimer on this one though: video games are still a waste of time, if you’re giving up most of your time with your spouse for them, maybe you should pay some attention before you become bed buddies with the couch. Also, for aspiring Casanovas, video gaming is generally not the greatest date option!