Video Games and One-Night Stands
What gaming and hooking up can teach us about better long-term relationships
There can be so much wild desire at first. You search and search, and then there’s that exhilarating frisson when you see exactly what you’re looking for staring back at you. Surging with lust, you are anxious to get home, eager to shed your stifling outerwear. Pleasure’s ache comes in waves, making your knees wobble. You tremble with excitement and your hand starts to shake. You use your teeth to tear away the foil. You waft in the intoxicating aroma as you break the seal. You can almost taste how good it’s going to be. You wet your lips as you envision the rollicking thrill-ride that awaits. You want to melt into your new conquest, getting lost in a voluptuous landscape and becoming one with it. You might end up spending the whole weekend in bed. The anticipation throbs as you prepare for insertion. Gently, you finger the power button and take out your disc.
I’m talking, of course, about playing a video game for the first time. That initial play session is often akin to a romantic experience. But in so many cases, the second encounter isn’t nearly as passionate as the first — if it even happens. All too frequently, playing a video game feels indiscernible from a one-night stand.
Indeed, you wake up the next morning, and you’re not in the mood for play. By the afternoon, you’ve forgotten the name of the game. The sun wanes and your eye wanders. You see some fresh desideratum brandishing a fulsome package and enticing screenshots, standing out among the others. Again, you get seduced. In the darkness, you’re hurrying home your new conquest. By midnight, you’re deep in another overnight liaison.
And what of all your old trysts? You look to your shelves, and they brim with video games, if you’re anything like me. From NES to PS5, I’ve got dozens of them, played once and cast aside. Worse yet, these games have been subject to promises that they’d be played again — vows that were broken when the next beguiling title came along. Oh sure, sometimes you might find a hot little multiplayer number and let your friends in on the action. But with most games, it’s one and done. Now they’re filed away lewdly, collecting dust like scrapbooks of nude Polaroids from former lovers.
Sometimes you truly want to come back to them. That’s why you keep a few in plain view. Cartridges stay plugged into systems, and discs remain lodged in trays. You leave game cases strewn about like Fredericks of Hollywood lingerie. You hope these little mementos will draw you back, reigniting the initial fire. But you crave variety. You need something fresh — something strange — to hold your interest. And with digital copies so easily available, it’s hard to resist another cheap online fling (which, in retrospect, seems much less perverse than renting).
Sometimes, while you’re dallying away, you catch a flicker of last night’s action-adventure or last week’s beat-’em-up or last month’s role-playing. It might be a flash of remembrance, or even a file on a memory card. Either way, the memories come flooding back. You want to rekindle things, but it seems like it’s been too long. Would it be different now? Probably. It might even be kind of weird. It almost breaks your heart thinking about what could have been.
And so, you channel all these awkward feelings into tonight’s acquisition. The torrid new passion helps you forget the old. But then you get to thinking about what you’re doing, and you start to question yourself.
Why do people have one-night stands? Perhaps it has to do with a fear of commitment. Why do I play so many games only once? Perhaps, like a Lothario, I dread attachment. If I play a game too much, I could get too into it and come to depend on it. Pretty soon, I could be defining myself by it. It could hold me back. I might have enjoyed a multi-hour session with Final Fantasy VII, but that doesn’t mean I want to become a Final Fantasy fanboy wearing pictures of Tifa Lockhart in a heart-shaped locket. That could spiral into some kind of weird cosplay routine. And, yeah, I had some fun getting a feel for Bayonetta, but I don’t want to give my entire life over to her. I don’t want to be married to Bayonetta.
I’m also not married IRL. The institution of marriage has always struck me as a bit outmoded, like an Atari 2600 cartridge in a PS5 digital-download world. There’s so many more bells and whistles now for single players to explore. Life is the ultimate sandbox game, with realistic graphics to boot, but with marriage, you run the risk of turning it into a pixelated rail shooter.
As it stands, marriage has some quality-of-life issues. I mean, is it worth spending a ridiculous amount of money on a wedding just to spend subsequent decades navigating through ever-diminishing connectivity and ever-gaining mutual resentment with your Player Two, ’til death do you part? That kind of lifelong commitment looks about as laborious as Ghosts ‘n Goblins for NES. Maybe all my history of single-serving video gaming represents my fear of marriage writ small.
Yet there might just be a chance to achieve some real character development through video games. Maybe I could try playing through a game to its finish. Making that kind of minimal commitment could be the first step to opening up to a long-term relationship with a game franchise, or even a girlfriend.
Or perhaps there’s a larger lesson that video games can teach us all about romantic relationships. It could very well be that the best possible relationship, like a good video game, has a good ending. With each significant other you meet, then, you would seek to complete that person as you would a video game. And I’m not talking about being their “other half” who “completes” them, as the clichés go. I’m talking about setting mutual objectives at the outset of a relationship and defining them with the objectivity and precision of unlockable achievements. Once all of these achievements have been unlocked, the partners agree to turn off the system and move on contentedly and maturely to the next person.
And if by some chance Player One and Player Two find that they are still compatible even with these achievements secured, the co-partners (or co-players) can chance it and try moving to the next level, but there’s no obligation whatsoever to do as much. When you’ve completed the game of being together, your immediate goal should be finding your next challenge, rather than getting sidetracked by chasing down additional content. Too many add-ons and too much DLC can keep a person stuck in the past, I’m afraid.
Just as you should ideally commit to playing a video game until you get to the good ending, you should commit to staying with a romantic partner until you reach your mutual personal-best finale, the cleanest of all possible breaks. For some, this clean break will line up with existential level-ups like a new career, a big move, or, for the masochistically committed, the passage of children into adulthood. After that, it will doubtlessly be refreshing to start again, as a new lover brings with them all the dizzying possibilities of a new-to-you video game, complete-in-box. This brand of serial monogamy, I think, presents a viable alternative to the institution of marriage and the Master Ninja difficulty level of “lifelong commitment.” Instead of having an archaic, abstract institution generating your map and programming your every move, serial monogamy ensures that you will always be the Shigeru Miyamoto of your life. And, as a bonus, you’ll avoid macro-transactions with divorce lawyers.
Life can and should be a series of good relationships and great games, with each one finishing on its own terms. This, I’m increasingly convinced, is a life of maturity, contentment, and continual stimulation. And now, I will put theory into practice. Tonight, I will resist the allure of the new games on Steam and PSN, calling out like Tinder dates and nightclub molls and all the other sirens. Instead, I’ll go back to Bayonetta, and I will play through her with tenderness and love, tonight and tomorrow night for as long as it takes. And when I’ve finally beaten Bayonetta, then I’ll be ready to love someone . . . until the next time the credits roll.
