Gaming As A Married Adult

This is the post I've rewritten the most times this month, and I still don't love it, which is usually a sign the subject is real.

Here's the situation, stated plainly. I've been married a long time. I have three kids, now 30, 21 and 18. I spent thirty-five years in a career that took a great deal of me. And through all of it I have played this game, most weeks, for nineteen years. Those facts have never sat comfortably next to each other.

The time is the easy part, and it's not actually easy. There is no such thing as free time when you have young kids and a job with a travel schedule. There's leftover time, and leftover time happens after everyone else is down. So for a solid decade my gaming happened between about ten at night and midnight, in a quiet house, with the volume low. That's not a complaint. That's just where the hours were. It also explains a lot about why I ended up an altoholic instead of a raider. You can level an alt in ninety minutes of leftover time. You cannot commit to a raid team.

The guilt is harder to talk about, and I think it's nearly universal among adults with a hobby that looks like nothing from the outside.

If I spend two hours on a Saturday reading a book, nobody in my house registers it. Two hours on a bike, that's admirable. Two hours in Azeroth and I catch myself preemptively justifying it before anyone has said a word. Same two hours. Same me. Completely different internal weather. And nobody put that there but me.

The disapproval is real too, and here's where I'll be careful, because it's not only my story to tell. My wife does not like this hobby. She never has. She doesn't play games, has no interest in them, and I don't think she has ever once looked at the screen and seen anything other than a grown man clicking on a dragon. That's a fair reading from where she's standing.

We've never had a war about it. Nobody has ever issued an ultimatum, and I want to be clear about that, because "gamer versus disapproving spouse" is a tired story and it isn't ours. What we have is quieter and more ordinary. A hobby I mostly don't bring up, and a mild ongoing sense that she'd rather I was doing something else, and both of us being adults about it for a couple of decades.

What I've worked out over nineteen years is that the disapproval was always about attention, and only incidentally about dragons. Any hobby that removes you from the room for two hours is going to register with the people left in the room, and games remove you more completely than most, because you can't half-do a dungeon while somebody talks to you about the calendar. Reading, you can look up. Gaming, you cannot look up, and the person talking to you knows it.

So the honest accommodations, arrived at slowly and never negotiated out loud. I play at the edges of the day. I don't schedule around it. I never once told my family I couldn't do something because of a raid, and I never will. If somebody needs me, the game gets abandoned mid-fight and it can go ahead and be annoyed about it.

Is that the right balance? I genuinely don't know. There's a version of this where I've been quietly apologizing for nineteen years about something that harms nobody, and there's a version where I've been mildly checked out at the edges of a lot of evenings and calling it fine. Both feel true depending on the day.

What I'm sure of is that the hobby has never cost me anything I actually cared about. Not a swim meet, not a graduation, not a conversation somebody needed to have. That's the line, and I've held it.

Everything else is just a man clicking on a dragon after everyone's gone to bed.

Cheers,

Joar