15. Confessions of a Videogamer.
By Ahchay

“My relationship of six years ended because of the PlayStation.”
Melissa, Blackpool, UK

I’m sorry Melissa, but it really didn’t. You changed, he changed, the world changed around you. Sometimes that change means that you grow together and sometimes… Well, sometimes it doesn’t.

Videogames, to those adults who play them, are still very much our secret shame. It’s the last thing we introduce in conversation with casual acquaintances, the thing we try to hide from work-mates and potential lovers – we’ve all had too many conversations that have petered out in “Oh, my son likes Playstation” and an embarrassed silence. It’s just not good form to talk about Half-Life 2 in polite company. So we congregate in secret, discussing the relative merits of the Xbox and the Gamecube in the corner while the rest of the party enthuses wildly about the latest mediocre Hollywood disaster and the Da Vinci Code is treated as a great artistic statement.

“Appaaaaaaarently, it’s all true”.

And the Melissas of this world know this and they exploit our weakness with their talk of ‘videogaming widowhood’

Obviously, I don’t know the details of Melissa’s break-up – maybe her unnamed man simply got too attached to his Rez Trance Vibrator. But I do know the details of mine, and I know that, no matter how tempting it may be to make that connection, videogames have nothing to do with it…

My marriage has been on a rocky footing for almost as long as I can remember. I won’t dwell on the reasons here, mainly because they’re mostly lost in the dark mists, but also because I don’t think that there are any reasons beyond the simple fact that people, as I may have mentioned, change. Suffice to say that we have reached the end of a very long road.

Someone else’s wedding. The cake is always , uh, greener.

As has been fairly well documented in these pages, I turned to videogames for comfort. Maybe, the thinking went, maybe if I get a Space Invaders cocktail then I won’t feel this emptiness so much. If I immerse myself in Link’s quest to rescue his sister then maybe I can forget about my own problems for a bit. And, when it all gets too much, isn’t taking it out on those bastard Robotron tanks better than shredding the backs of my forearms?

And you know something? For the most part, this sort of works. The thrill of caning Geometry Wars for an hour really does make the hollow feelings disappear, the bittersweet ending of the Sands of Time makes me cry big unmanly happy/sad tears, Monkey Target does make me feel like I can fly, and there is an immense amount of satisfaction to be had from soldering your own harness for an arcade board and watching it spring into life for the first time in years. Videogames have saved my life countless times over the last few years.

Jumper.

But there is a price. There is always a price.

My wife became a videogaming widow. She commented on it. Frequently.

So I would throttle back my videogaming habit. And subsequently the hollowness would rise again, my dissatisfaction with my life would drive me to increasingly erratic behaviour. Arguments would start over the most trivial of subjects and worst of all – we both started taking our own problems out on our daughter.

Then, I would buy a new videogame, or trade for a new arcade cab and things would slowly return to some form of equilibrium.

“Just one more go, dear. I’ll sleep in the bath again, tonight…”

And so it went on. I have no idea how many times we’ve been through the same loop. We’ve tried again and again and it has now become apparent that it’s not going to magically get better. And life, perhaps unfortunately, doesn’t have a quick-load function. There is no going back to a time when our marriage wasn’t fucked up, we can’t try again using a slightly different tactic, or a better choice of weapons and failure in this game leads to a little more than being knocked out of the picture for another go.

So we’ve changed. We’ve grown. We’ve moved. I think that both Michelle and I are better people as a result of the last thirteen years, but we’ve grown at different paces, and in different directions. We haven’t grown together - we’ve moved apart and it’s time for both of us to look to the future, separately, rather than to dwell on our past mistakes. I’ve spent a third of my life with Michelle and she continues to be important to me, not only as the mother of my daughter, but as a friend. We’re parting on good terms, and all I hope for is that, rather than brooding over the bad times, we can look back at our time together and recall the good times with fondness.

February 2005

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