Stellar: Video Games

After two years of writing this column I have decided this month to finally share a little part of my private life with you, something I’ve kept from you all this time.  You see, I suffer from a condition.  It’s not something I admit in public and it’s certainly something I would normally keep from my female friends, mostly due to fear of rejection and shame.   But I think it’s time to come out, to raise awareness and hopefully finally gain acceptance: not just for me, but for others like me.  So here goes: I play video games.

I play them a lot.  Not the cool ones either.  It’s not like I occasionally play FIFA with my mates after a night in the pub.  I don’t just dabble on my iPhone on the train.  I have a full-on bunch of friends that I’ve only ever met online and we get together and try to kill each other in new and interesting ways.  I even … look, I’m sorry, this is difficult to admit, so bear with me … I even chat to them via a headset over the internet.  They call me Xtr3me Warl0rd.

Ok stop laughing, this is serious.  People who play video games online (PWPVGO) are ridiculed the world over.  Hollywood movies stereotype us as grossly overweight hyperintelligent virgins with dermatological problems, but we’re just the same as you.

I’ve tried including the Frau but if I’m a bad loser (and believe me, I am), she’s the John McEnroe of home entertainment.  It would be roses and rainbows playing Call of Duty until eventually, no matter how hard I try, I end up winning.  Then the red mist descends and my normally passive and rational lady morphs into Naomi Campbell.  Flinging the controller at either the flatscreen or my head, she erupts in an explosion of profanity that would make a sailor with Tourettes blush.  This is followed by a ridiculous stream of conspiracy theories and excuses.  The button got stuck, she pressed the wrong button, I was cheating, the game is broken, it’s gender-biased, I tried to put her off, her battery died, she was distracted by a squirrel, and so on.  Finally there’s an extended period of sulking during which it’s my duty to melt her with promises of shiny things, food or DIY jobs.  Frankly, it’s not worth it.

So I play alone, at home, with PWPVGO.  Like every misunderstood minority there are a few people give us a bad name.  There are the extreme Second Lifers who exist more in their virtual world than in the real one.  As I write this, there are companies designing virtual wrapping paper for people to wrap their virtual Christmas presents to put under virtual trees for their virtual families.  And people will actually pay real money for that wrapping paper.  If you were to design a virtual recycling service, I guarantee you, someone would pay you to take away their virtual rubbish.

Then there’s the World of Warcraft bunch that wish they were born in Middle Earth.  They play endless marathons online as dwarfs, Orks and wizards and paint lead characters of dragons in their spare time.  Take Lord of the Rings, give all the female characters double D implants and dress them in armoured chiffon bikinis and you’ve got World of Warcraft.  These guys are the least accepted members of our community and in fairness have shaped the stereotype of PWPVGO the most: unusually shaped facial hair on pale skin and speaks three languages: sarcasm, HTML and Na’vi.

But they’re people too.  We’re all people.