Good Games, Bad Relationships [Part 1]
How Overwatch brought my relationships to a breaking point
Gamers fantasise about how their virtual life online could evolve into a romantic love affair. But in 99.9% of all cases, the two worlds clash and envelope into a catastrophic fireball. Why can’t these two goods, (i.e. The real-life and the Game) never gel or synergise harmoniously?
Having the opportunity to play the game Overwatch was a dream come true to me in 2016. The team comradery, the mastery, rank climbing and intellectual strategisation was everything that I wanted in a game. None of this was shared by wife; however, who simply viewed me as a brain dead zombie as soon as I put in my two-way earpiece. In late 2017 slowly, my passion for Overwatch consumed me, as the competitive ranking system, required me to play better and more skillfully. In Overwatch, however, you not only have to increase your skill but carry your team, which means being one or two tiers ‘skill-wise’ above the rest of your team, to win the round. After several months, my passion would turn into the strict undisciplined and serious match playing with a ‘never switch off/or quit’ rule in competitive matches. This was encouraged by the overwatch gaming system, as it pretty much meant your team lost if someone quit on your side (i.e. 6v5).
As I was developing my team, getting regular matches with players I was familiar and could rely upon, my wife was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and gave birth to my baby daughter ‘Joy’. However, despite this monumental event in my life, I continued to play Overwatch for several hours a day despite having a newborn baby in the family.
As I write this today, it blows my mind, that I never took a break from playing Overwatch, yet at the time, I was fully dedicated to seriously improving my competitive ranking each season, and the games where we made a comeback, or had some tough wins were just incredibly beautiful moments for me.
The two worlds crashed at several points. For up to a month, I was always 15–20 minutes late to the family dinner with my wife and her parents (who were living with us). Having married into a conservative Chinese family the reverence toward the ‘family dinner’ was unquestionable. Each competitive match in Overwatch was 10–20 mins long; I absolutely could not just ‘quit’ a game; it would have killed entirely my team’s chance to win. My wife was just speechless, she couldn’t mouth the words, ‘he’s playing a computer game’ as an excuse for why I could not come downstairs for the family dinner.
Next, our baby daughter was also going through her ‘poop’ ‘sleep’ ‘wake’ cycle, which involved numerous nappy changes throughout the day and night. On one occasion, our baby made a gigantic mess in her diapers. My wife pleaded for my help at the changing table, to the point of yelling, but our team was about to break the second checkpoint in Hanamura (map in the game) (which we nailed after almost 10 mins of back and forth tide battling) I could not exit the game. This amazing victory, however, was contrasted with a fierce verbal and physical fight with my wife, which had never in our relationship ever become physical. (*note no one was hurt, it was more like a wing Chun sticky hand type of fighting). After the fight, I was shocked. What happened here? We never fought physically, in the past, what was the big deal, it was just a nappy change? Couldn’t it wait 10mins, I was in the middle of a match?
In March 2018, my wife and her parents purchased tickets to return to China with our daughter of 3 months. I was told only after the tickets were purchased-they were leaving. My wife mentioned that she knew that I would be okay with that. She said that “I was simply not there”. At this stage, I was so used to appeasing my wife to gain Overwatch playing time that I would say yes to everything. Secretly, I was looking forward, to getting more office work hours in, and playing more Overwatch, now that she was overseas. I was blind to any precipice in my relationships.
In May, the skype sessions with my wife and baby were going terribly. My calling times were always not appropriate as they were during the baby’s scheduled time for bathing, or eating, or sleeping. Once I called in, and her parents were in a full tirade about how I was selfish, inconsiderate, foolish and useless, unbeknownst to them, my wife had started the phone call in the back seat of the car. I then was denounced by everyone in the car for calling at the wrong times. I always called during the most inconvenient time, bath time, sleeping time, lunchtime, dinner time. After trying dozens of different times there was simply no times in the day when it was an appropriate time to call them, neither was a fixed agreed time of the day. Many calls went unanswered after this, and I didn’t speak to the wife or baby for 3 weeks. My wife would text message back angrily that the family was not returning to Australia.
In April, I was fortunate enough to receive some counselling sessions, run separately by the organisation I work for. I went to the sessions, as I felt the tensions and arguments with my wife were wearing me thin. The counsellor suggested abstaining from gaming. On April 27, I played my last competitive session of Overwatch, with the goal of not playing for 2 weeks. This ended up being the last time that I played Overwatch.
As my abstinence from Overwatch continued with what I can only describe as painful, hair pulling, fidgety, perseverance, the relationships with my family improved, and my wife and daughter returned to Australia after 3 months of separation. I had missed key moments when my daughter learnt to crawl on all fours, learned to stand using a wall and say her first words.
I still revere Overwatch and look forward to potentially playing it in the future, but it was a case of Good Game — Bad Relationship. My relationship to the game was bad; it was overwhelming, unconsciousness and consuming. My relationship with my wife was bad, eroded by my home hours being whittled away into Overwatch time. My relationship with my baby was non-existent; I spent more hours on Overwatch than taking care of my daughter.
In the end, I was fortunate enough to have been rescued, by a generic leaflet tucked in the corner of a medical reception which brought me into counselling.
In Good Games, Bad Relationships [Part 2] I will describe how it is not the game, but our relationship to it, which is the source of gamer-family tension.
