Video Games Are Easy

When Diana first explained to me the conversation she had had with Nick (poor Nick; our first blog topic is all about proving him wrong) I found it amusing that even though, in principle, I disagreed with him, I understood exactly where he was coming from. My teenage years were filled completely with video games and I often assumed that my friends were extremely bored with out them. My bias came from my intense devotion to games and how a particularly engrossing game would not only occupy most of my free time but most of my thoughts during the rest of the day as well. And when I had finished that game, the lack made life very boring. I assumed that my non-gamer friends felt like this all the time.

Now, admittedly, I’ve got a bit of a video game addition (and most of the previous chapter could be in the present tense as well) and this sort of gaming, which was mostly one-player gaming, might not be what Nick was talking about. However, having video games makes entertaining yourself much easier. Once you’re into the scene, it’s easy to pick up something new when you’ve finished a game. If you’re bored, just find a new video game to play. You have your entertainment planned out for you.

So I don’t think this is a gender issue. I think this is a social issue. We gamers may not understand that people who don’t play games aren’t bored but I know that my friends were perfectly entertained; they read books or did crafts. In truth, my one-player games were the equivalent of these activities in that they are all solitary. The difference comes from addictive quality of video games and how easily they can be entertaining.

But I knew that other people in my high school figured out how to spend time with people outside of school, something I really didn’t care about until senior year of high school. Being less socially mature and definitely more of a staying-in kind of person, it took me a while to realize that talking to people wasn’t the most boring thing you could do (especially when video games were always so much more flashy and exciting). Maybe this is where Nick’s idea of mischievousness comes from; kids hanging with nothing to do, chatting it up, then, bored, finding illegal ways to entertain themselves. This may be true, especially in places like my hometown where there was never anything to do, but it is definitely not gender specific.

I guess what I want to say is that I don’t think that there is really a problem here. Would bored girls (and boys) benefit from more games that are multiplayer but not necessarily competitive (as Simone mentions)? Probably, but there are already a lot of games out there and those who want to play them are going to. I think kids are different from each other and will entertain themselves different ways, but illegal and mischievous activities are not going to result from boredom on its own.

~

Becca is an MRI tech for a neurology lab in St. Louis. She lives with her boyfriend, Justin, and dog, Sokka. She is not a well-known writer, but thought it was really hilarious to do this bit in italics like she was a guest writer for a newspaper.