Anyway, I read this, and was rather irked by the whole thing. If you don’t care to follow a link, basically it’s full of stories about people playing co-op Pixeljunk Monsters with their girlfriends/wives/fiancées.

I guess it’s the condescending “Wow, my silly little girlfriend didn’t like videogames and now she sees the light!” tone that goes through every story. Every time they mention “cute” and even at one point “maternal instincts” it makes me a bit nauseous.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking to play videogames – that’s most people for you. Likewise, I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with playing them – some people are into that kind of stuff. But when the two meet, and one assumes some sense of superiority over the other, that’s where the problems begin.

I really don’t think these people should be together, to be honest. You’d think a small matter of differing hobbies wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, but the more people I talk to the more I realise it might be. The problem is that it’s a bigger divide than most hobbies – it shows differing attitudes towards entertainment, technology, information, productive use of time and money and in general, having fun.

If your partner doesn’t like your games, they probably won’t like your comic collection, or the amount of money you spend on graphics cards, or they won’t understand why you want to go to a midnight screening of The Dark Knight, or they won’t stop feeling threatened by the amount of time you spend playing WoW (to be fair, the last one gets unhealthy fairly quickly). But the best you can hope for is that they simply won’t care, and that’s already a wedge between the two of you.

It gets worse though. What happens when they actively object? Often, it’s on the grounds of the whole “Grow up why don’t you?” argument – the idea that games are for teenagers. Maybe that’s true – maybe kids are in effect turning into teenagers more quickly, and that people are trying to stay teenagers longer, or whatever. Maybe we’re just more aware of the need to have some fun in our lives, and that the fast pace of modern life requires time to just sit down and relax. Whatever – I’m not too concerned with arguing for either side. My concern is that you like to play games.

But your partner objects. Which leads to situations like this:

Early this year, I purchased a PS3 under the pretense of playing games of all sorts with my girlfriend.

There’s a lot wrong with this. Why does he feel he can’t be honest about what he wants? Why does she control his purchases, in effect infantilising him? And why does that work as an agreement between them? I mean sure, part of him probably wants to be infantilised – the number of guys out there who want to be mothered is a bit scary really. And certainly a lot of girls see dating as a DIY improvement project (and of course, for both situations, it can work with the genders reversed).

So you wind up seeing situations where one party is forbidden to buy [x], or do [x] or whatever by their partner. This is quite common, and it leads to resentment on both sides. It effectively turns it into fishing/drinking/playing poker/buying shoes/going out with the “girls”/”boys” from our parents’ generation, when one of the purposes of hobbies was to get away from your partner. This is the 21st century, and I think nowadays the drive towards forming relationships is less and less for procreation and more for mutual company. And so, if you’re lucky, the relationship ends.

But why date these people in the first place? I mean, I’m not advocating finding someone with absolutely identical hobbies to you, but at the same time, I think hobbies and interests are something important that people neglect. There’s nothing like the experience of talking about something you enjoy to someone who understands it as well as you do (unless you’re one of those troglodytes who can’t enjoy something if their partner is better at it or knows more than them), and not being able to share that with a partner isn’t a good sign.

Unfortunately, people settle. And maybe this person seems okay apart from everything else. But while some differences can be worked out, I think this one goes fairly deep. Deep enough that you end up arguing, and unhappy, and both resentful of the other. And then you find me, but that’s another story altogether.

Maybe I’m talking out of my ass. Maybe I’m just overly disillusioned at the number of people I’ve seen unhappy because of these things (myself included). I’m certainly not discounting the idea that people can get along despite a lack of common interests. I just think internet/gaming/geek culture is a wider divide than most people give it credit for. Not only a cultural or interest divide, but a fundamental difference in mindset and priorities, and I don’t think enough people recognise it as such.

And so I don’t think those relationships are going to last. Maybe it’s a step in the right direction, but for the most part it looks like too little too late.

Edit: You’re so vain you think this post is about you.

Ben X is about a boy called Ben with Asperger’s syndrome (a type of autism). Online, he’s a powerful warrior called Ben X, but in real life he’s a shy, misunderstood bullied teenager, and the film details his struggles.

Personally, while it was ambitious, I thought it failed on a number of levels. There were a few neat factors – most notably the incorporation of the MMORPG ArchLord and it was reasonably competent, but it just wasn’t mindblowing on any level. And I expect mindblowing from my festival films dammit!

So our poor Ben is played by an actor at least 10 years too old. He’s perhaps a bit too effective in his acting his part as a scary loser, because I thoroughly lost sympathy for him partway through and starting hoping the bullies would beat the crap out of him at one point. I guess it doesn’t help that I’m used to watching Asian films, which can be pretty extreme with the bullying scenes (even in comedies like Shaolin Soccer), and comparatively while Ben’s situation sucks, I find it hard to feel sorry for him (though part of that is because I’m just a bitch). Though it was well acted – I was especially taken by the fact that the same nervous tic is repeated by both the actor playing the young Ben and the older ben – and there are other instances of similar attention to detail.

Ben uses way too much internal monologue, because the director also wrote the novel upon which it was based. I had a writing teacher who said that we shouldn’t be afraid to slaughter our sacred cows (those being special, beautiful lines we love and don’t want to get rid of), and this guy really needed that advice. Internal monologues should be saved for bad TV.

The relationship between the guy and the girl kinda pissed me off. Anti-social internet guy winds up with a girlfriend who looks like this:

I really do hate watching movies where the guy gets a girl way too attractive for him. Their relationship overall was poorly depicted. Why would she know his cellphone number but not have his photo after a year? More importantly, why would a guy like that who doesn’t understand normal social interaction find anything attractive in a normal girl? Hell, is she a normal girl? Her personality is far too poorly defined. I feel the movie didn’t establish their relationship at all beyond a cursory conventional romantic thing, so there was a major lack of believability there.

For that matter, his online life wasn’t really defined beyond being “Level 80″ which was a shame, because it’s always quite interesting to see people’s online double lives, especially when contrasted against their real lives. Basically I think the writer was bluffing his way through the entire online aspect of the film (fucking noobs), which means that the main hook of the plot was… toothless (yay mixed metaphors!). The director also doesn’t know when to show and don’t tell, and I saw the ending coming a mile away.

The structure of the film is really disjointed as it’s intercut with “documentary” type interview footage with various characters – all of this is meant to convey some sense of dread, but instead cluttered up the film with largely empty dialogue (”It was only a matter of when.” “It’s sad when kids like this do things like this.” type stuff) and the desired effect could have been achieved more subtly (though it’s possible some parts to make it make more sense were cut during editing, or were from the original novel). But instead all it did was slow the film down at strange points, and could have been cut entirely, I think.

What I did like was the visual linking of the game world to the real world – the HUD would appear, the game mechanics would be mentioned as a metaphor for Ben’s life and so on, but these are applied pretty haphazardly. There’s also a weird Christian element that meshes poorly overall.

Don’t get me wrong though. It wasn’t a terrible film by any means – it was competently done. Just it fell short of the expectations I had of it given its presence in the Film Festival, plus my standards are absurdly high. The old man sitting a few seats down from me walked out, though I think there was an element of generation gap in that. I think to its target audience, it’ll hit its mark no matter what, but personally for me I feel it was lacking.

Kind of weird, but then it’s mostly because I got a massive urge to play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic again. And while I’m at it, Knights of the Old Republic 2. And Jade Empire, also by Bioware and apparently very similar.

Mostly I just want to beat the shit out of stuff as a Sith lord (actually, probably lady – I’d rather be hitting on Carth than Bastila is all), which I suppose can wait till the release of Force Unleashed, but it’s just not the same.

I like the excessive amount of customisation – the lightsaber crystals, the armour options, the various force skills and all that. The characters aren’t ugly like in Oblivion and the combat is fun as hell. Plus you know, actual characterisation. Good stuff *thumbs up*

But yeah, I also want to know what happens next, hence the desire to play the sequel. I know it all goes to shit in the middle when they needed to complete the game to a deadline and so on, but I like the first game enough to warrant playing the second, I think. And Jade Empire is apparently similar, but outside the Star Wars universe. Which is cool – I’m not a huge Star Wars geek by any means.

And then I was thinking I might play around with XBMC too – I was thinking of just getting a Macbook and playing the PC versions of all those games, and then installing XBMC for Mac on it, but would my hypothetical laptop even be able to handle doing all of that?

But yeah, none of that happening as of yet. Just idle ideas still floating around, waiting to be realised. Meanwhile, I just sit here and feel like killing things with lightsabers, and am sad because I don’t have a proper media center.