What is this?
and why are we here?
Player 1 has Joined
My name is Tom, and I like to game.
I am a 28 year old, white, heterosexual, middle-class, Western, English-speaking, cisgendered male who works in the technology sector. Statistically speaking it’s unsurprising.
I’ve gamed since I was irresponsibly young. The exact age escapes me as my memory is garbage, but it was certainly in the single digits. I started on adventure games like Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle before moving onto Doom and Wolfenstein and Rise of the Triad and Warcraft 2 and Duke Nukem 3d and Blood and other fountains of hyperviolence.
Gaming formed the backbone of most of my childhood. Like many others I was encouraged (read: mandated) to enjoy the glorious outdoors, forcing down the fresh air and feverishly counting the minutes until I could get back inside and look at a screen again.
Games have been traditionally tailored to people like me. They tend to feature:
- Big muscly white dudes with big guns
- Thousand-yard-stare middle-aged white dudes with smaller guns
- Young sarcastic white dudes with magical powers (or guns)
- Straightforward Hollywood plots
- Explosions
- Probably a token female character without significant clothing
Sorted, we’ll make millions.
It’s no surprise then that we end up here. I still spend most of my free time gaming. I read about games constantly. Most of the podcasts I consume are related to gaming. I spend a truly stupid amount of money on the hobby; it is my principle interest.
This information is masturbatory window dressing however, as this blog is not about me.
Player 2 has Joined
Her name is Tong, and she did not game.
She is a 26 year old, Chinese, middle-class, bilingual, heterosexual, cisgendered female who also works in the technology sector. She’s interested in poetry, depressing fiction, knitting, dressmaking, piano, really depressing fiction, sea otters, feminism, mixology and the TV show House.
She had played Pokemon Red, Pokemon Blue and Candy Crush Saga before we met. You will note the significant difference in familiarity with the medium between us.
We have been dating for almost three years and recently moved in together. At first I bored her to death with endless talk of games and gaming. Games are just not something that occupy the same level of importance to her and that’s fine. She likes cats.
What is this?
Finding games for the two of us is not easy. The pairing of a gaming-savvy enthusiast and a willing-but-unfamiliar partner is almost laughably common, yet the selection available is meagre.
The purpose of this blog is to catalogue our experience with the games we’ve tried. It is my hope that other carbon copies of ourselves will find and deem it a useful resource. Or at least one that is not actively an offensive waste of space. I don’t set the bar high.
One important clarification is that this is not a list of Games For Girls. People often conflate Girls with People Unfamiliar With Games and cause all kinds of inflammatory bullshit with that attitude. Girls can be gamers and Guys can be clueless about gaming. Let’s move on.
This is a list of games that can be played together with someone previously unfamiliar with games. That is all.
ONWARDS TO GLORY!
