[originally posted August 9th, 2009]

Whenever I talk (re: whine incessantly) to R. he’s always all, “You’re just bored lately! That’s all!” Which makes me really angry, because I’m all like, “Why would you even think that? Just because I have nothing to do except watch old Nicole Kidman movies on Instant View and avoid important responsibilities that terrify me? You’re just jealous!” And then I switch our relationship status on Facebook to something incriminating. It’s complicated!

One of R.’s arguments is that guys aren’t bored because they have video games, while girls, lacking video games, become extremely bored unless they have sexy fashion-oriented careers, lots of shoes to organize, or babies in their wombs (I actually added the last part, but I think he was implying as much). This is clearly a very scientific argument centered around years of scientific research. Girls do not play video games, ever. Guys do not not play video games, ever. The gender divide between boredom and not boredom has been marked as such since the Dark Ages, at least, and it shows no time of stopping. Video games will only get better! Girls will only look stupider and stupider for avoiding them! No wonder women have been historically oppressed by the patriarchy … anyone who ignores the siren-call of World of Warcraft really deserves to be tried for witchcraft or married off at eleven years old in order to give birth to male heirs. God, women. If you can’t put up shut up.

Case in point: to illustrate this entry I was just searching for images of “girl gamers” on Google, and a HUGE percentage of the results involved girls who were a) naked, b) in a spread-eagle position, c)covering key parts of their bodies with game cases and consoles, or c) all of the above. This is what it means to be a girl gamer! It means you have a Call of Duty 2 case between your legs! Never forget that’s the defining element of your being. A “girl cook” works at weird clubs and has sushi rolls served on her naked body. A “girl mechanic” poses with a screwdriver held to her mouth like a lollipop. And on and on. The only real career you can have is to be a mother, which legitimately and necessarily involves your reproductive organs. Everything else is a sham. Why have that Call of Duty 2 case propped there? It’s blocking the baby!


But of course I’m just being militantly whiny as a joke. There are video games for girls. Made very specifically and pointedly for girls, to teach them important life-skills. I’m too poor to own a console, though, so I have to turn to a more reliable resource, i.e., my very own laptop, and the wealth of computer games over at Big Fish Games. Why should girls buy expensive video game systems? Apparently they only use them as lingerie. Anyway, they need to stockpile diaper powder and mashed carrots in jars, and purchase strollers as big as Buicks, and sexy jewel-encrusted oven-mitts, color-matched with their pedicures. If girls want to play video games, they should play them right on their laptops, clicking over from their food porn and Forever21 shopping carts.

Here’s just a candy-box sampling of the girl-friendly offerings you can download at Big Fish:

- Nanny Mania
- Yummy Drink Factory
- Wedding Dash: Ready Aim Love
- Vogue Tales
- The Great Chocolate Chase
- Supermarket Mania
- Satisfashion
- Puppy Stylin’
- Lovely Kitchen
- Kindergarten
- Ice Cream Daze
- Fitness Dash
- Dress Up Rush
- Carrie the Caregiver


There are four basic rubrics of girly-games: fashion, care-giving, weddings, and food. I think that’s pretty fair because really what else do women think about? All these games involve the same basic operation: perform chained events over and over again, with increasing difficulty, until you’re able to multitask like a pro. Most of these games are grouped under “Time Management” games, because everyone knows that girls are obsessed with time. Their biological clocks tick so loudly they can’t even hear their professors or bosses, which is why they’re so suited for the home. Time is like a cannon-ball tied around their ankles, or a pretty albatross necklace. Hurry it up! Find a man before your skin wrinkles, have a baby before your eggs dry up, run for X amounts of hours to work off X amount of ice cream cones. Bring those diet cokes to Table B before they vanish in puffs of angry-smoke and you lose a star!

I’m really charmed by the lack of escapism in these games. You’re doing totally practical things! Stressful, practical things! My senior year of college I was briefly obsessed with what is now the overenthusiastic grandma of all the other time-management games … Diner Dash. Three years later, it’s spawned a ton of add-ons where you can travel back in time (“All Knight Diner”) or even into fictional worlds (“Through the Cooking Glass”). But back in 2006, kids, it was just the basics. Diner Dash basically involved seating people, taking their orders, waiting for the food to cook, getting the orders to the tables, waiting for them to ask for the check, and clearing the tables. As the game progressed you got certain groups of people who didn’t want to sit next to each other, or maybe families with babies who would spill and need a mop, or the lines would get really long and you’d have to go to the podium and turn on the Muzak to calm them down. When I played the game, I would end up nearly crying from the stress, feeling like a total clumsy failure, and pleading with the tiny color-coded customers to JUST BE PATIENT PLEASE I’M TRYING SO HARD YES MA’AM I HAVEN’T FORGOTTEN YOUR DRINK ORDER OK THIS TABLE IS READY GOD I’M REALLY SORRY. I felt bullied and frazzled and totally resentful of my little customers … but oh, the sweet triumph when I managed to send a table off with full hearts and a thumb’s up sign and I got a great tip and went on to the next level.

So basically I was just like a waitress, only not getting paid real money, or interacting with real people.

All right, OK. Again, I’m just being funny for the sake of the internet. I know a lot of these games involve escapism. Just like guys can act out their burning desire to chase down hookers in a generic Ferrari or travel to distant lands to rescue the princess, girls can also bring a little sparkle and fancy to their computer-game lives. For instance, there is one game that takes the Nanny Mania trend and adds a dash of whimsy … instead of human babies, you’re hired-grunt surrogate-wet-nurse nanny to a bunch of MONSTERS.

The backstory is something idiotic like: “In Daycare Nightmare, you care for baby vampires, dragons and other little beasties while their parents are at work!” But we all know what’s really going on. In the gooey pink depths of your female brain, of course, the actual scenario is that Don-Draper-turned-vampire ties you to the headboard, brutally rapes you during your fade-to-black, and a week later a bouncing baby monster claws through your tummy! Aw! Miracle of childbirth! Quick, take photos for Facebook. And then take care of your baby monster. For hours. Tirelessly. Until you can move on to the next level.

Ladies, we should all be so grateful that we live in an age where a simple hour-long trial of a computer game can teach us so much about our future “sad-single-gal” careers and our reproductive duties and even about frosting cupcakes or cleaning up vampire spit-up! Of course I’m kidding, though. I’m always kidding. I know these games are just mild amusement, and why not pretend to serve food or plan weddings? Besides: we all know the real point of video games is to lick them, squat over them, use them as sexy censor bars, or arrange them around our bare-naked bodies on our Target bedspreads and take photos while our parents are out at Red Lobster. And that is not a joke. And that’s why I am so so so bored.