It's Not Cheating If She's Digital

Ok, so we’ve all been caught in compromising positions before, right? Maybe your wife visits your office one lunchtime and discovers that the screensaver you promised her was a picture from your honeymoon is in fact Olga Kurylenko doing the splits
; maybe you’ve had to explain more than once that the lipstick on your collar really was Jambo “having a laugh”; or maybe you’ve been caught more than once researching late-night channels for that “scathing letter you intend to write to the TV network”. Most of these can be explained away as simple misunderstandings, of course, or by the judicial application of that world-famous and timeless rule of thumb: boys will be boys.

But how do you explain, as explain you surely must, when your wife walks in on you air-punching because you just managed to get down and dirty with a bisexual blue-skinned alien? Makes you wonder what constitutes infidelity in the 21^st Century…

I remember the days when I would sit balled up at the foot of the couch, pad in hand, while my dad sat above me and cheered me through Bowser’s Palace, or timed my Sonic the Hedgehog speed runs. Fair enough, there wasn’t a great deal of variety available back in the heyday of the NES and Master System, but the point is that once upon a time a games console was an entirely family-oriented device and there was no inherent shame in a grown man playing platform games about plumbers and blue rodents. But these days there’s a gargantuan gulf between “adult” games and the kid’s market as vast as the personality differences between Crash Bandicoot and Marcus Fenix.

I have a fairly large game collection, and apart from Tiger Woods and Top Spin 3 I don’t think I could count three games I’d feel comfortable playing with my 10 year old nephew watching, or even with my 2 year old daughter in the room. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some old-fashioned fuddy-duddy with an antipodean view towards game censorship – quite the opposite, in fact – but it’s hard to be a respectable family man and an adult gamer at the same time.

I would readily hold my hand up and say that I put some work into getting Ashley Williams and Liara into bed, and I put a certain amount of effort into securing at least one spouse in every town in Albion – and don’t even get me started on how many gifts I had to buy Morrigan…

But did I have to do these things? No, of course not. I could have just played the game from start to finish like a mature grown-up but, and here’s the kick in the Fereldens, it wouldn’t have been half as much fun. Which brings me back to my opening dilemma, when my wife and daughter came downstairs from their afternoon nap and found me whooping like a quiz-show host while, on-screen, Liara’s baby-blue arse glistened in a convenient spear of moonglow.

No amount of stammering and nervous smiling was getting me out of it: here I was, getting intimate with another woman. My cries of protestation got me nowhere when faced with the argument that, at the end of the day, I had wooed, flattered and flirted with another female, be she fictional or not.

But the point I’m making (and there is one) is this: we do have a choice whether or not to engage in such practices, but if the “right” choice is not to, then why would we have the option in the first place? Because, as I’ve said before, games may be marketed for adults or children, for single men and women, for the hardcore and the casual, but – and I say this without rancour – they are not marketed for husbands and fathers.

But I’m only human, and only a male. Give me these options in a game and I will pursue them as an important, nay intrinsic, part of the experience. So I’m left instead to think of excuses to chase after pixellised tail that don’t simply paint me as being some kind of shut-in perv. The best one I can come up with is that as a reviewer I have no choice but to sample everything a game has to offer, no matter how base or childish or creepy.

Yeah, didn’t work on my wife, either.