Justify my love

I don't know if it's ok to love Battlefield this much. I am a grown woman. I have a garden to grow.

Maybe it's because I don't fit into the fps-stereotype. None of my friends play games (except for Rumble and Drawsome and Farmville and...you know) I can't tell my friends I had such a great round on Operation Firestorm last night. And if I tell them deadie spawned on me they will assume I just offered way too much information about our sex life.

It's like I carry this bad conscience around that I wouldn't have had if I had spent two hours every week night watching TV or sewing curtains or something.

Or maybe it's the perception that all other interests are hobbies, but computer games are an addiction. Have you ever heard of anyone badly addicted to golf? Reading? Painting? But if I spend 200 hours on Dragon Age, people get worried.

Games is an amazing medium, and we are only at the beginning. And as an artform - people who don't game don't understand how many creative, artistic decisions that go into making a game. What it means to be the actor inside the artwork. The feel of it, the memories, the experiences.

Instead, you have to defend it. Or make up things that games are good for. "You get really fast thumbs!" As if laughing and crying and cursing at the game is not enough, it needs to be useful too. How useful is a carousel? A painting of a boat? A mystery novel? And all this is worse when it coes to fps:es. It is seen as immature, as a pastime for children - but still, no, no, children should not play such wicked games.

Women shouldn't play such games either. It is obvious, because in the gaming world women are often treated as, well, game characters. Game + woman = game woman, meaning a sexualized object. In the fantasies of gamers I meet online, I have DDD cups and am playing the game naked except for my bikini armour. And those who realize it is not so, act resentful and bitter about it, like they were cheated out of something, and instead decide that  you are a cunt, an attention whore, a fat bitch. 

It's weird when you are none of the above at all. Just a gamer.
 

And outside of the virtual world, oh my. I went into my local game store to buy a new headset. The guy behind the counter asked me "Who is it for?" Well who the fuck do you think it's for? My dog? The Battlefield keychain and the Nemesis dog tag tank top under my suit jacket didn't tip you off?
 

I wish I could explain how beautiful it is by the Caspian Border when the sun glares over the hills and through the foliage. What it feels like to break out with your squad when the enemy has all the flags, to flank, to turn the game around. To make that impossible head shot. To get to your squad mate in time to revive him. It may be a totally useless thing to do, with no function in the real reality where I live, but I really don't want to make up excuses as to why I do it.

I do all those other things. I feed banana peels to my roses. I do the laundry.

And I love Battlefield. I'm sorry. But that is my real reality.