My wife mostly plays Civilization and Crusader Kings these days. She’s really into grand strategy games. Outside of that, she really likes games like the Sims or Harvest Moon. Right now, she’s playing Yoshi’s Crafted World with our eldest son.
Also, she used to really like shooters. But I really don’t care for shooters so I’ve never bought one and she’s not interested in them enough to play on her own.
It’s heartening how many folks here have partners that don’t game. I never have, and I’ve always wondered a little bit what it’d be like to have a partner who is genuinely as excited as I am for something like a Ninja Five-O remaster. A glimpse into another world!
Anyway, my husband is very lovely and does not indulge beyond Mario Kart. The man loves a good cart and a blue shell! I get bored of competitive multiplayer games really fast, so we’ve never really played much together. He does occasionally ask me about the hobby when it crosses over into the mainstream and I have to explain some horrifying phenomenon to him, though (e.g., GamerGate)
I would never say she is into games, but she does play very occasionally. She’ll get an itch and sometimes she plays for a long time (7 straight hours of Zoo Tycoon once) or a little bit and be satisfied. Latest adventure has been Breath of the Wild. Surprised she likes it honestly. She really likes to have direction in a game and also not too much to do (I’ve yet to find a game that really hits that middle ground. Please suggest!) she also enjoys Mario Party and Mario Kart but who doesn’t?
My girlfriend and I are in a kind of weird situation regarding our game playing habits. Until my early-to-mid 20s, video games were the most important thing in my life: I figured my eventual career would be as a game designer, though I wanted to take a few detours and accumulate other life experiences first. Along the way I realized that maybe I don’t actually like games, but not before playing massive amounts of them for “research”. Now I don’t regularly play games – just occasionally dipping into them for nostalgia purposes.
My girlfriend on the other hand is much more normal with how she enjoys games. She doesn’t feel this pressing need to “understand the nature of digital entertainment” the way I do – she just plays them. I think with movies we’re kind of reversed – she used to work in the film industry (specifically the costume department) and her work now is still film-adjacent, which I think sometimes limits her ability to just watch movies for fun the way I can.
I guess it works out well though because a lot of my first-hand knowledge about newer indie games comes from watching her play them. At the same time I can recommend her older stuff to emulate and she will actually play these games from start to finish instead of just dipping her toes in like I often would.
My partner is a casual game player, in the way that most of everyone is.
This post isn’t really an extrapolation of that point, but I wanted to show you all that she remembered a tirade I had 6 weeks ago about David Cage and the state of game development.
Some anecdotes I forgot:
I’ve never seen my partner get into any game as much as she got into Destiny 2. I have no idea what that was about. I played the first one religiously during its run, doing raids and grinding for top gear and what not, and she was wholly not interested.
When 2 came out, I brought it home and she laughed at me and said, here we go again. A couple days after that I come home from work and she’s playing it, her eyeballs absolutely glued to the TV. I’m like, wtf is this.
I got bored of 2 pretty quickly but she didn’t. I’m not joking when I say this game became as much a part of her daily routine as breakfast or brushing her teeth. She got obsessed. I’d never seen anything like it before. Looking up loot guides and watching hour long lore videos. She got really into the Hive and their whole hierarchy of deities.
It was actually super cool because I did get back into it a bit (not as much as her) and we would set up 2 PS4s with 2 TVs in the living room and run strikes together, old school LAN party style. We’d spend our whole days off together doing this and it was a magical time.
Also, she got really into Seaman. I had tried and failed to keep Seaman alive twice before, and immediately after the second time I killed one, she basically snatched the controller away from my hand and started the whole process herself. She did raise Seaman to adulthood and we saw the ending and his little Seaman dance. She did good.
Here’s a snippet of chat one night when she was out of town:
She was dedicated.
My wife (married 25 years) had our most gaming time in the dreamcast era, lots of typing of the dead, crazy taxi, virtua tennis, puzzle fighter, samba de amigo, house of the dead 2. Now she’s happy to just do the wordles and sudoku’s of the world. maybe we should revisit home arcade gaming again.
On chili!
My partner plays regularly and has played long before we met. She grew up playing Bust a Move and some other PS1 games with her dad and graduated to Kingdom Hearts and other light hearted videogames in her teens.
Nowadays she will mainly play The Sims, Phasmaphobia, 7 Days to Die and other survival / crafting games but will play some smaller indies or big releases - she’s really into Dragon Age.
She’s not really into action games though so we don’t play together all that much - Dragon Age is perhaps the limit of how much she can comfortably deal with but she’s played all the Borderlands games and enjoyed them. Yakuza was too much for her though but she wants to watch me play them from the start because she was into them when I played some of the more recent games.
She really likes Picross too. I think that’s the only real impact I’ve had on her tastes.
She will rarely get into Insert Credit weirdo territory but she appreciates when I talk about some nonsense games with her and will be curious enough to watch me play them and ask questions or join in the fun. Just last night we were talking into the wee hours of the morning about what we like about different games.
Before I met her I’d dated / been in relationships with people with wildly varying opinions of games - one had played Spyro as a kid but practically had an active dislike for any game as an adult while another ended up getting into Phoenix Wright after I’d recommended it to her. Another encouraged me to try a couple of prestige mainstream games that I wouldn’t have bothered with before and I ended enjoying them for the most part.
During my late 20s, barring one or two people the subject of videogames still had a pretty negative stigma attached to it when it came to navigating the dating pool but when I reentered it in my mid-30s post pandemic there seemed to have been a big shift in general attitude, which was probably how I ended up meeting more people who played, and played with me, and I’ve been extremely lucky to end up with my partner now.
Yeah. I was just thinking of asking for this too. My wife is exactly like that.
