Boys and their toys

As I write this, Husbandio and one of his best friends are lounging on the floor playing some kind of shoot 'em up game on the PS3. This got me musing on the appeal of games consoles. I've had my moments with computer games - as a kid, I used to play a lot of Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg and Rocket Raid either on my cousin's Commodore 64 or on my Dad's BBC Micro B, and even went through a phase of buying books of code and keying them in to create my own games. Well, OK, to recreate someone else's games. And even today I consider myself to be a bit of a geek - I have a close, even symbiotic, relationship with my laptop, and have a bit of a soft spot for a gadget. But playing with games consoles for hours has rarely attracted me.

Since Husbandio and I have been married (12 years in September, goodness me...), we've owned a lot of consoles. We bought the original Playstation amidst much excitement, and I have fond memories of staying up til 4am playing a demo version of one of the games which we thought was just amazing at the time. It was a racing game with competitors on a bike, skateboard, luge or rollerblades, and you could kick, punch or generally shove the other racers. And if you fell over, your character slid along the road, causing one or other of us to crow "oh no, scrapy face!". Good times, good times. Other games which we've enjoyed playing together have included Tomb Raider (I was the navigator, Husbandio at the controls) and Ray Man (just 'cos I think he's cute). But generally the consoles we've had in the intervening period (each successive generation of Playstation, the Xbox and Xbox 360, the Wii and various other Nintendo things whose names I now misremember) have been much more Husbandio's than mine. He's happy to sit for hours, and I mean hours, with games like this shoot 'em up or with Fifa 09. Even on Facebook he'll play games like pinball or minigolf, and I just don't get the attraction.

Having mulled on this for a while, I've concluded that there are several reasons as to why he loves these games, and I'm just not bothered.

1. He's just naturally good at them. Either that, or he's benefiting from 25 years' practice. The point is that he can pick up a game and do well at it pretty much straight away, which means I can never beat him. I actually find watching him play more fun than playing myself, since I just get annoyed that I'm not better at what I'm meant to be doing.
2. The games appeal to his competitive nature. I'm not sure whether I'm less competitive because I know I can't win, or because I genuinely don't care if I win. That's a psycho-analytical step too far even for me.
3. I only really like platform games with cute characters, or which are funny in some way.
   
4. I really can't understand the games where you have to customise a car or a character - just seems to me like the virtual equivalent of dressing up Barbie. Husbandio is, oddly, happy to spend more time with this aspect of the game than with playing it. Perhaps I'll come home one day to find him playing with Isabel's Barbies!
5. These games are a key way in which he engages with and socialises with his male friends. Whereas girls are content to just talk to each other. We are but simple creatures.

Right, end of post, and they're still busy killing things. Time for bed I think!