Last week my husband came home with Blizzard’s long-awaited Starcraft II nestled under his arm. It’s a video game. He hadn’t mentioned any plan to buy it and as he walked by, as he loaded it up, as I heard the roar of Blizzard’s famous opening cinematic movies coming from his office, a queer almost forgotten feeling in the pit of my stomach slowly materialized into nostalgia. I remembered this. I’ve been here before. But there was quite a different flavour mixed in. What was that?

As I fumbled trying to identify it as bitter or sweet, it was easy to remember it’s origins. It had been years – nearly ten actually – since I’d seen my husband sit down and do the thing he has loved best all his life: sitting at a computer to play a video game.

Don’t get me wrong. He adores his Xbox 360, dabbles with the Wii, obsesses over which games are on sale and what his gamer score is on the iPod, but that particular image of him and his PC game, a game in which no wife or children are involved, had been absent from our lives for a very long time.

Gaming had almost nothing to do with my life prior to getting married. I mean, my kid brother would get me to help him solve puzzles in the 11th Hour when he was stuck and I was known to play a mean game of Tetris when bored. But I happened to fall head over heels for a gamer who was more man than any tight pair of wranglers I’d ever seen.

And I love my geek. But for a long time, I felt like a widow as he played his games. He’d be at it for hours. We did lots of other stuff together, but there was something about the nature of this  hobby that because I didn’t understand it lead me to being jealous of the time he spent with them.

He did his best to find games we could play together. There was Worms and You Don’t Know Jack, a trivia game with a smart alleck host, that we sat at the computer together to play. But the immersive games were lost on me. He was in the middle of Ultima Online when we got married, tried Everquest briefly – thankfully it was never his crack – played through the original Warcraft games and expansions. And who could forget the first Diablo or Wolfenstein? Honestly, I thought it was a waste of time.

I read while he played and kept my opinions to myself. I wonder if he thought my hobby was a waste of time. ha!

Can’t be though because what I read was his library: Star Wars novels, Tolkien, Lawhead, the Chronicles of Narnia and Robert Jordan. I read almost everything he had and begged for more. What a sneaky man. By introducing me to fantasy books – something else that had been absent from my life prior to him – he was simultaneously sowing the seeds of my conversion. I loved fantasy in book despite myself and my perhaps less than hidden disdain for fantasy in video games. Fantasy opened up my imagination, showed me I had choices in life and gave my romantic sentimentality a sense of playfulness that was desperately needed to balance my serious side.

And he never stopped trying to find more games I would like and that we could play together. (Still hasn’t actually.) Once he had moded our very first xbox and loaded it with emulators, we were… wait, wait, sorry I’ll say that all again in English for ya. He took his original xbox, sautered some memory chip onto it that voided its warranty and scared the hell out of me but allowed him to load software on the xbox. That software would “emulate,” meaning run old computer systems and their games that had been hacked by other people. In other words, we had a Commodore 64, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis and others INSIDE the xbox, and we could play the old games on the xbox.

So on this rogue system, we played even more Worms and found Tetris Attack. A  forerunner of Bejeweled – you know that game, right? – that was familiar to me because of the name Tetris, it really wasn’t a tetris game. You are getting rid of blocks, not dropping them. Nevertheless, it was a hit at our house, and we became hardcore. Competitions began as soon as the two babies were tucked in for the night and continued furiously into the wee hours of the morning. I dreamt of those brightly colored blocks with crazy faces. My strategy I plotted in REM.

Matches were won and lost. There was definite competition. I couldn’t beat him until I’d played enough on any given night to get into a groove. That’s when my fingers became magic and the hours melted away… together.

Little did I know, but we had established our beat. And it was fertile ground to sow in some Diablo II. He suggested, and I, on a Yoshi high, agreed. Nothing in our life has been the same since.

There was an enormous learning curve moving from a game controller to playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse, but once I stopped the swearing and sighing and being too stubborn to ask for help, I loved the game. I loved it so much that I never wanted to stop. And he loved that I loved it. My butt didn’t leave the computer chair for hours.

Without high speed Internet without malls in the middle of nowhere and our biggest luxury being that we owned two computers in the first place, we clobbered demons, crawled dungeons and had way too much fun slaughtering cows. We ended up playing through Diablo II countless times with several characters on several different difficulty levels. It was my first experience pretending I was someone else, someone made of pixels, and that’s when Kalanna was born. I used Tolkien’s elvish dictionary at the back of The Silmarillion to make up the name and alias that would give me the freedom to try many new things in the years to come.

It was then too that I discovered my everlasting love of breaking barrels. There could be treasure inside! And a girl can never have too many mana potions. Smash, boom, bang! Who cares if we’re about to get eaten by a horde of angry Bonebreakers, I see a barrel and it’s MINE!

Diablo II was so much fun, a story to dive into, frustrations to take out by dealing out fireballs and extremely empowering too. It may seem a giant leap to switch from a discussion of video games to women issues, but for me the two are linked.

Letting myself simply enjoy my time, moving outside of the stereotyped women who lived and breathed (down my neck) all around me was huge. Huge! And my acceptance from that moment forward of the gaming culture in my home instantly made me a different kind of woman. Someone, when I look back, that I’m so proud to have become.

From there it was an easy move into Halo and Baldur’s Gate and, when we got high speed internet, World of Warcraft. I’ll never forget my first sleepless night. Stayed awake till four in the morning or something crazy to finish Star Wars: Republic Commando, the first game I played beginning to end by myself. I had arrived.

As time has gone on, I find my favorite games are still ones that I play with my husband. The recent exception was Dragon Age: Origins in which I didn’t know how to react or feel when I started… sorry when my character started flirting with another character of the male persuasion. His name was Alistair. It was kind of too real for me. Awkward romance aside, Dragon Age let me be the hero in 3D, in a story I controlled where I could glory in the well-chosen path and put up with the consequences when my steps weren’t so well-placed. But the lines of right and wrong were really blurry. You could be whoever you wanted to be – a personality of myriad nuances – and still end up in the same spot at the end no matter what. The game accepted you for who you were. Frankly this made me nervous and uncomfortable. I wanted to be the hero who did it right. Same way I play life. But the game just wanted you to do it your way. Same as life really is.

Puzzle Quest was also awesome, being a similar game as Tetris Attack and taking me back to those days, only it involves some more serious strategy. Mages always need a plan to keep their cloth covered bottoms from being scorched.

Anywho, I’ve wholly embraced the culture of gaming now. My kids play. We play. We all play Rock Band together  We’ve moved onto to board games and our rec room basement is now such a crazy perfect layout for the tv/xbox, board game area and then the computer station from which I hope to one day be tearing through and taking names in the upcoming Diablo III and The Old Republic.

I play as much as I can. I just began Puzzle Quest II which is massively even better than the first and hope to start the duo of Mass Effect games as they are sci-fi versions of Dragon Age by the same company and huge hits and why aren’t I playing them right now?! Because I have too many pots on the fire. Creativity explodes in my head on a daily basis, and I follow where it wills. One day it sends me to my sewing machine, another to the keyboard to talk to you fine folk, sometimes to the kitchen or the garden. Gaming comes in last place in the summer, but first in winter.

So when the husband brought home Starcraft II, what was that unavowed feeling? It was four of them, actually. It was me remembering the days of widowhood, then crazy jealousy that it wasn’t the kind of game I enjoy therefore not a game we could play together, mixed with supreme vicarious giddiness for how much fun he was going to have, and lastly remorse that I had ever made him feel bad for being who he is. Somehow, him walking in the door with that game brought us full circle. We’ve arrived. I’m a gaming gamer’s wife. Because it’s been the most fun ever. +5 to family game time.

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