Slauka's Sunday

 

”So, what did you do yesterday?” Every now and then my friends will ask me that question, and of course I usually answer it. However, that answer, 95% of the time, will not include what I actually did do . Most of my real life friends are people who come home after work to spend their evenings at clubs, or the cinema potentially with a boyfriend or girlfriend.

My girlfriends especially are people who will wake up a few hours earlier each day to make sure that their looks are as pleasing as possible. Few of them have any knowledge or understanding at all of my favorite waste of time; games.

I’ve had several discussions with different people regarding this, and comments like “are you embarrassed by it?” and “you call them your friends, yet you can’t even tell them that you played a game the day before?” keep popping up. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of it, it’s just that they don’t really find it interesting so I see no reason to talk about it.

I had a little chat with a friend of mine the other day, regarding things that were precious to us from our childhood. She actually mentioned the Super Mario games for NES and explained how much she had enjoyed running home from school in between classes just to play with her friends even if it was just for a few minutes. The conversation continued and she ended up saying that the reason why she didn’t want to play games any longer was because of all the people that constantly kept talking about the games they played, and that she didn’t want to become one of them.

It’s sad, though I do understand her. I mean, haven’t we all met a person or two that just kept talking about the world's most uninteresting thing ever and just wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times you tried to change the subject? I know for sure that I don’t feel like talking with them a second time. Of course my friends ask me how it’s going just as I will ask them things about their hobbies. The hardest part is to keep in mind that yes, chances are that they’re doing that just because they want to be nice and not because they actually are interested in it. My ranting for 30 minutes about how I almost killed a boss is just as boring as my friend describing, in detail, how he built a wooden model airplane. Altogether it can be interesting, but let’s skip the part where the glue dries, shall we?

When talking with people that I don’t know, or that I know don’t play as much as I do, I try not to mention games at all. In fact, I see that as my chance to get away from the whole gaming-community. The main reason for that is because often, when talking with other gamers, there’s almost only one topic to talk about. Games. Games, games, games and more games. Has anyone else experienced that awkward silence that occurres when you try to talk about something else, just to find yourself swapping back to the previous topic to get any kind of conversation going again? Am I the only one that hates it when that happens? Afterwards I always end up with the feeling that “hell, I can’t talk with this person”, and then I ask myself “If I cannot even have a normal conversation, then why am I spending time with him/her?”.

In the end I just had to tell my friend about how much time I actually put into playing games, and she was shocked. Most of the people around me are aware of the fact that I might be a little more geeky than the average girl, but not to what extent.

This made me wonder though; all the bad reputation that gamers get, how much of it is actually created by ourselves? No-lifers, incapable of having social relationships, you name it. As always prejudice is involved, but something to keep in mind is that in most of those cases the victim isn’t completely guilt free either.