Ok, I clearly didn’t wake up today and figure this out. I knew what I was signing up for when I married my Husband, heck, when I met him, I basically peeled him out of his gaming dungeon beneath his parent’s house and into life outside of the glow of the screen. I’m not even joking when I say that when I met him, he had dark rings under his eyes that I think only inmates in solitary confinement get due to lack of natural light.
When we got married I stayed true to his passion, it was basketball for me and gaming for him, Our table names were our faces super imposed into video games and famous basketball films, I even found little yellow mini games consoles for people to play on on the tables.
Seriously, in real life, I knew the drill, when if it hit 10.30pm and he was talking to me he would start slurring out of tiredness, but if he was about to beat a level on The Witcher, that brain was in tune and the fingers deftly and masterfully commanding the scene.
Im not cute, I knew what I was getting into, if anything, I became his enabler. It was me that saved for months to buy him the PS4 for his first birthday together along with a life size replica birthday cake (set that bar a bit too high there didn’t I). I bought him a Nintendo switch for his 30th birthday, and rented a video arcade for the party for all of his mates to relive their 13 year old dreams (and too be honest their 30 year old ones too) .
I’m pretty sure all of his friends WAGS get very annoyed because I buy him the newest console of the moment and they often follow suit, hopefully because they want to, not because they need to block out him being unbearable to their other halves.
Honestly, I know that I’m an enabler. I know I am. If he was 50 stone and in a documentary, I would be the one that everyone would be pointing at as the disgraceful feeder….
BUT
Any gamer widow has a game that for some reason, has their significant other gripped by the balls and when it’s released they turn into a shell of their former self. They turn into a crack addict, desperate for a hit, any time, at any expense. The expense might be not doing a bit of housework or starting dinner when you’re still at work but managing to “level up” for the 400th time that month.
The plague in our house is Overwatch. A game that can often leads to me having to listen to him and his best friend grunt over “healing” or “positioning”, made only worse by the fact that said best friend isn’t even in the room physically, but coming out of the PS4 speaker (that I bought for him *sigh*).
I thought this addiction was bad enough and then I heard two American basketball style commentators on the TV and apparently there is an Overwatch league where people pick a team and … cheer.
My mind is blown by this, as someone who is well into sports and a Jock who married a Geek, I cannot believe that gaming is that big that it is selling out arenas.
I mean I’m an IT teacher by trade, so I totally know the power of E-Games. People get paid a crud tonne to film themselves playing games, I assume in some basement somewhere. They don’t even seem to put in the same effort that most youtube genre’s have to. No millions of lighting rings, no top SLR spec cameras to make sure that they look perfect, no swanky location. It’s just a camera (sometimes a webcam) just trained in on them whilst they do what they would be doing anyway! No one even knows if they have trousers on. (I always assume they don’t, stereotype much?)
So my annoyance isn’t in the game playing, it is in the fact that this is how my husband was when I first met him. Did him falling in love take away his multi million earning potential. Right now could he be dripping in Bitcoin but he chose a human over VR?
I’m actually more annoyed at me. Dammit I want to be a gamer WAG dripping in cryptocurrency.
