The Mentality of a Gamer

It's been a while since I posted.  Mato ended up not playing much Halo after a while due to the fact she didn't feel good enough for the regular maps and the same 3 maps for big team kept coming up so she got tired of those.  We played through some BioShock and my son and I started playing WoW again, she played a little bit but her computer really isn't good enough. I plan on getting her something nicer as soon as I can.  For now she's mostly watching Netflix shows while I work.

We had an interesting conversation yesterday though.  As soon as I got home Monday my son and I fired up the XBox E3 presentation to watch it.  She fell asleep in the bed behind us.  I mentioned to her yesterday that moment would have been a good bonding opportunity with her and my son (which they seem to get along very well anyway).  She mentioned how tired she was and I said "you could sleep later!". Her response "You could have just waited to watch it.".  In that moment I understood two things - the first being I understood her point, in theory we could have watched it later, there really was no true point to watching it at that exact moment other than the pure excitement to watch it.  But the second being that she truly doesn't understand the significance of this E3 event.  It's been 8 years since the XBox 360 launched.  The closest comparison I can think of is The Super Bowl, but I'd guess that the Super Bowl would have to happen every 8 years for this to play a factor.  I simply tried to explain to her that this isn't an event you "watch later", this is the type of event a gamer such as my son and myself stay awake to watch no matter how tired we are.  I attempted to explain the signifance of this E3. I even gave examples of midnight launches of games that we too stayed up later to attend.  She nodded as if she understood and we moved on to other conversation.

It's times like this that I wonder, does she really enjoy games or does she play them simply to be a part of our hobbies? I've seen her get into minecraft so much I was having to tell her how late it was.  I've seen her overanalyze ninja fish to the point she won't get more line until she gets all the treasures.  I think she does enjoy games, I just don't know if she gets excited about them.  The fact of the matter though, there's no wrong answer, as long as she's enjoying herself I'd much rather have a girlfriend who played just to be a part of my hobbie than didn't play at all, as long as of course she isn't truly bored and not admitting it.  I don't know if she'll ever get that excitement we get when the next Halo game releases or the next WoW expansion launches.  But I still look forward to her coming along for the ride. :)