anna

My father is declining, my father’s declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers’ declining.

Aye, 'tis my father’s declension.

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.

I would also want to add that many of these terms are regional and subculture-specific.

In the specific part of Germany I grew up in, a ‘joint’ was any smokable rolled cigarette-like object with cannabis in it. Nobody used any more specific words like ‘blunt’.

Then talking to people one town over, they looked at you as if you were from the moon if you called anything a ‘joint’ that didn’t have tobacco in it. To them, a ‘joint’ was exclusively a mix of cannabis and tobacco, and a ‘blunt’ was cannabis-only.

Then there’s people who add weed to pre-bought cigarettes, people who insist on using leaves, filters and no filters, tobacco or no tobacco, and so on. Most of these terms are really regional.

I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.

I’ve seen so many mixed opinions about this game and I can’t figure out how many of these opinions are relevant to my playstyle and tastes in these games.

Where does Bus Bound fall on the various scales of vehicle simulators? Is it a complete accurate-to-the-last-decal vehicle simulation that in order to enjoy, you basically need a bus licence and a lifelong obsession with bus manufacturers? Is it a casual bus driving game like what Euro Truck Simulator 2 is for lorries? Does it have a management aspect, and if so, how deep does it go? Is it particularly moddable? Is it made for wheel-and-pedal players?

I think the game with the highest playtime for me is Final Fantasy XIV with around 1,2k hours. That’s only Steam though, I’m sure Minecraft is way, way higher than that.

You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the ‘gamer guys’ I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn’t understand.

They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon.

Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora’s Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque ‘gamer girl’, when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games.

I eventually realised that these ‘gamer guys’ just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’. It’s really just misogyny.

I understand where this is coming from, I think. Both are distinctly different and bittersweet in their own way.

I just don’t think having experienced unrequited love from both sides fully encompasses knowing the full spectrum of love.

I have had about ten relationships in my life, and every single one of them was different in a meaningful way. Every person in your life is a wholly unique experience, whether it’s unrequited love, a short-lived relationship or a deep friendship. I am an amalgamation of everyone I’ve ever known and loved, and I appreciate that this is what life gives me.