I missed last month’s Round Table in the hustle and bustle of NaNoWriMo, which was about the impact of gaming on our current familial relationships. However, I did cover a bit of that in October’s post, so it’s time to move on to the next topic, which is how we envision the impact of games on our future familial relationships.
I want to preface this post by mentioning that, like most people who’ll be responding to this topic, I have no idea what kind of a family I’m going to have in my future. It could be that I’ll wind up a crazy witch living in a run-down shack surrounded by a swamp, who spends her days scaring away all the neighbourhood children. Which would be tons of fun, come to think of it. Or alternatively, I could marry a hunky fireman and have all his babies. Who knows? I also have no idea what my relationship to games will even be at that point. I could still be designing and programming them, or I could get sick and tired of it all and wind up travelling around the world while taking videos of myself dancing. The possibilities are endless!
One thing I’d like to say on the topic of romantic relationships, however, is that I have trouble understanding the laments of gamers (usually heterosexual males) who wish their girlfriends were gamers as well, or at the very least, that they’d stop looking on their favourite hobby with scorn and derision. Honestly, if you want your girlfriend to care about games so badly, then go find a girlfriend who cares about games. Otherwise, you’re gonna have to suck it up. There, I said it.
That said, I had a bit of an epiphany several weeks ago, after I gave a short guest lecture to some UBC education students on video game violence. Most of these students were female, and I found that a lot of them suddenly became really interested once I brought up the subject of “socially responsible” games such as Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, September 12, and Execution, which subvert traditional game violence mechanics and, as I argued, would make for interesting tools to use in the classroom as a result. A couple of these young women even came up to me afterwards and gave me the “I’m not a gamer, but my boyfriend is” speech, expressing thanks for my talk as well as a newly-sparked interest in giving the games I mentioned a try. So, perhaps there’s hope for your girlfriends after all. Just send them over to me, I guess.
Of course, this post should probably be more about relationships I would have, in which case, I’ll say that being a gamer isn’t necessarily a requirement. I mean, sure, they’ll have to care somewhat about what it is I do for a living — at least the storytelling and consciousness-raising aspects, anyway; the tech stuff really doesn’t matter so much — because otherwise, they’ll probably get bored out of their skulls around me. But I do prefer the company of people who have interests and aspirations and fascinating ideas of their own, no matter what field they come from. Mind you, this goes for friendships just as much as it goes for potential significant others. My criteria for both are pretty similar.
Okay, that last paragraph sounded a little too much like a personals ad. I apologise.
Finally, I’d like to add that if I have children, I expect that they’re probably all going to find interests other than games, because they’ll come to see gaming as something their mom does and seriously, how would that not be embarrassing? Either that, or they’ll play a lot of mindless, bloody first person shooters just to annoy me. Aren’t I optimistic or what?
