In a recent article I worked on for GotGame, I expanded on my recurring theme of gamer romance. This article in particular explored the idea of once you’ve found yourself a girl who’s cool with video games, does one prefer to play with her or continue to play alone while she cheers on? This is a topic I’ve often discussed with men and women, gamer and non, so I was quick to sink my teeth into it.

Having quite a few anecdotes in my arsenal, I felt that I should only choose one to illustrate my point. The one I went with is most appropriate to the article, but its close second is a story that simply must be told somewhere. If this tale doesn’t apply to you, I’m sure you’ll get a chuckle from knowing someone whom it does. For those whom it does apply, see this as a warning.

A couple of years ago, I took up a seasonal gig in the cafe of a local Barnes & Noble. While there, I had the pleasure of working along side a fellow gamer, allowing myself the rare opportunity to have someone to bond with while on the job. While quite competent, he was a bit more of the dorky breed of geek than I normally associate with, but hey, any port in a storm.

This fellow would often tell me about his girlfriend whom he’d met online in Final Fantasy XI. Your classic online relationship. We’ve all been through it; this was his turn. He was in North Carolina and she was living with her family in Utah. They’d been together for roughly a year by the time I’d met him and that Christmas season, they’d planned to finally meet face-to-face when she flew over to spend the holiday with him. As the story always goes, he’d bought her a ring as a gift and planned on popping the question to her Christmas morning. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I wished them the best.

Fast-forward to the week of the big visit. During the end of one of our shifts, I’d asked him how the whole adventure had been going. And yes, I wanted juicy details. He tells me that most of their shared time is spent playing games together–specifically, Dragon Ball Z: Budokai. I thought, how sweet! So I asked how it feels to play side-by-side for a change. He replied, “Well… It’s more like I’m playing while she watches.” I suddenly experienced that sinking sensation in my gut that the hero in a zombie movie experiences when he notices that his best buddy has a bite mark on his arm.

My curiosity shifted into interrogation. I asked if he encouraged her to play with him. I asked if he offered to play any games that she enjoyed. I asked if they did anything together during her brief time there (other than the obvious) that didn’t involve playing video games. All were met with the negative. It occurred to me to ask, “Who paid for her plane tickets to come visit you.” I knew before I’d asked–she’d dished up the cash herself to pay for her flight to see his dopey ass…just so she can sit around, bored, while he plays video games.

I tried to explain the situation so that he might appreciate her efforts and reciprocate with gratitude. Alas, I could not sway him. What makes this experience most memorable are our parting words. These character-telling words, once spoken, resonate in my ears and shall haunt me for the rest of my days. Before walking out the front doors, he turned to me and said, “Well, you know… There are some things a video game can do that a woman can do that a woman can’t.”

This man does not deserve his dick.

Holding back my tongue and fists, I politely responded, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, sir.” and bid him good night. For the rest of my time working in that cafe, I refrained from seeking updates on their time together. I can only assume that nature took its course and the relationship eventually met its inevitable dissolution.

It’s his story (and so many others like it) that inspire me to continue trying to educate my geeky brethren not to make the same mistakes. Many of our kind suffer from social malnutrition in our upbringing, leaving them lacking in the empathetic awareness to form bonding relationships with others. So we must at least offer a hand from time to time to raise them up toward greater potential–even though it feels like playing handball against curtains–if for no other cause than to keep them from perpetuating the image of geek that makes the rest of us look bad.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Games, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.