Has playing videogames ever ruined a relationship for you?

This is an interesting question, but I think I would need to know in what capacity. The obvious ones are addiction and gambling, but I also know people who started dating other people that were varying levels of "oh you're one of those video gamers" (post GG a justifiable quasi red flag) or even like, one person being asked to play more or less and the connection therefore kind of dwindling.

Not from my end, as I play games with balance.

But my ex gf was way into League, and during COVID it sort of became her primary focus. So a few months of emotional cheating later, she leaves me for a guy ten years younger that would play with her 4 or 5 times a week.

Thankfully this hasn’t happened to me. My wife and I work out our hobby time as she doesn’t really play games outside of the occasional Mario Kart or Party. She also has hobbies that aren’t my thing. So far we have reached a good balance, though it’s tough finding any time when you have young kids. I do play far less than I did when I was single, but the balance is good and worth it.

I've never dated someone who played video games outside of the odd Mario Kart, Mario Party or Super Mario Bros. session, so games have often been a little fraught in my romantic relationships. The most recent longterm relationship I had, my consoles stayed in the apartment I never slept at for nearly 7 months before our work schedules changed and I brought them over to stay entertained by myself. We played Until Dawn together and she watched me play The Last of Us because one of her students told her it was amazing, but otherwise we continued to mostly watch movies and TV just via PS4 rather than Firestick.

I can't say that the change definitively altered our relationship, but I can say I was noticeably less present in the relationship in terms of doing things around the house, running errands and planting surprises for when she got home and things like that once the consoles came over. So I have always had a little twinge of regret for re-introducing gaming to my life during that relationship because I slowly became Same Guy But Different.

So maybe?

No, but I'm pretty sure that my Steam library has the potential to preemptively ruin a potential relationship since some purchases are a prudish woman's nightmare.

But then I again, I'm very picky, and I mention ecchi as a litmus test so see if I can be down to clown with someone of interest. So if she's not going to get all uppity due to me having played Senran Kagura: Peach Beach Splash for 69 hours, things should be fine.

It has not been a notable problem in my relationship which recent became a marriage. We each have our hobbies, some are shared, some aren’t and all in moderation. On the odd time I’ll binge a game or take a night all to me but they are the exception. As long as someone is not locking away every night and otherwise being physically and emotionally unavailable, there shouldn’t be a problem.

Not really, for me at least.

The closest to "videogames ruining a relationship" I got was when I lived on the East Coast, away from a lot of the friends I had grown up with, and we played an hour or two of multiplayer games a couple nights a week to catch up. This in and of itself wasn't a problem, except my partner at the time (we'd been dating less than a year, didn't live together but definitely not long distance,) wanted to talk for an hour at least every night on the phone, and the only free time in their schedule on weekdays perfectly lined up with when my West Coast friends got off work a 3-hour timezone away.

In general, they were pretty demanding of my time and emotional energy, so this sliver of time became an ongoing pain point. When it became clear I wasn't going to stop these sessions -- because I wasn't going to give up the one way my friends and I kept in touch -- they were annoyed and said something to the effect of, "ugh, they're just video games," when no, it was voice chatting with friends and games happened to be the medium.

But games weren't the catalyst, they just happened to be involved in one of many fronts of an ongoing tension my ex and I had. I haven't had a single problem with games in any of my other relationships.

That time during a LAN game of AOE2 I chopped a path through the forest into the back of my friends base and flooded it with garbage. Friendship ended.

It’s less that it has ruined any established relationships so much as prevented relationships from developing. I have had a few times where I’ll go on a few dates with someone, sometimes even become physically intimate with them, and then at some point I mention or they observe that I play games and they bounce almost immediately. This has happened more than once with different people in different eras of my life.

And frankly, with people like gamergate assholes, Call of Duty bros and rapists streamers seemingly representing the culture, I sorta don’t blame them. The average person that doesn’t play games at all sorta thinks it’s a weird thing to spend your time on, and the the way other media represents it all is piss poor. Hell, when I have dated other people that played gamers like myself, umm, they sorta sucked. That’s not to say all gamers suck, but man do we still have work to do on our image and some take that bad image to be an excuse to behave poorly.

So anyway, I answered the poll as not sure. I’ve never been broken up with for that reason (at least not that I know of) but I’ve been avoided or dodged for that reason.

It's sort of the opposite for me. Though the relationship did end eventually, games ended up being one of the few activities we did together, as reading is a more solitary experience and I'm not really into the Youtube scene. She wasn't into games (except SiMS as a kid) before our relationship started, and I didn't introduce her to them till we had been together for over a year, but gaming was some of the most fun we had together, both in person and long distance.

We played "a lot" of Monster Prom together, finished Papers Please and got through Life is Strange and LiS Before the Storm. I left the country before we finished the "farewell" bonus episode, and we broke up a few months later. We finished it a few weeks after that in a very emotional session and still occasionally play Monster Prom/Camp even though it's been a few years. I honestly think the relationship would have ended sooner if not for games, as our hobbies are very different and we were drifting apart.

I don't really play video games that much anymore, so no.

Never ruined one, but has certainly helped me realize I was in the wrong one. My ex would often sigh and complain when I said I was going to play, no matter how much time we had spent together. The moment she stopped doing that was the moment she suddenly had her own thing (started studying). I realized at that time that I had spent a few years being argued with over the fact that she had nothing going on in her life, it wasn’t me spending too much time on my hobby it was that I spent ANY time on my hobby because she had none of her own.

My current partner understands that it’s a hobby that I want to spend time on and they even got their own switch recently because they got really into Animal Crossing (they never really played anything else prior). So it’s been a real novel experience to play games with a partner, but more importantly it’s been nice to be able to say ”I’m going to play for a bit” and have a partner that sounds positive rather than negative.

I can't be sure... I probably got dumped by one of my exes cause I'm more of a broad spectrum loser, but my video gaming probably didn't help at all.. I think it illustrated my loserness, especially to her (she was somewhat traditional in her view of how people should behave. Ambitions, hard work, shit like that.. The opposite of getting really good at [Insert Game De Jour]. ) She was right to leave, cause I just loved video games so much more than I loved her.... That's not great probably.

Hasn't been a problem in any of my other relationships. They ended for other reasons. (at least to my knowledge..)

In this day and age, being a late gen X gamer, women are not exactly chasing me down. I think I was born about 15-20 years too early to be seen as anything but the nolife loser I essentially am by prospective partners.. Seems younger generations are more OK with that kinda person, the chase for success has diminished generation by generation and gaming isn't seen as a hindrance to success and a corrupting force, an enfeebling hobby for morons and babymen. The stigma is much less now than it was even just a decade ago.

I have made zero efforts to procure a mate in the last 15 years or so. Just not worth it, I'd rather play video games alone than deal with yet another person who couldn't give a fuck about my hobbies or thinks they're lame and really likes to talk shit about it the way ladies my age would tend to do.. Nothing makes me feel lonelier than trying to tell someone about something hilarious that happened in a game and they look at me as if I'm telling them about a fucking Ludo victory I had...

Anyways..

My wife and I actually play a lot of Swith together in the evenings, because she doesn't like spending too much time just watching movies/TV. Switch games we can play together are a fairly narrow subset of games in the grand spectrum so I tend to play video by myself in the mornings. This has caused few direct issues since my wife work early in the mornings but there have been plenty of times where if I was doing something, or planning something else other than playing games during that time I would have avoided upsetting her. I'm trying to ensure I don't do that anymore and get stuff done in the mornings.

not on my end but i met my ex-husband in ffxi and after we got married i slowly stopped playing when he deployed , we ended up picking up aion after he returned from deployment n that was fine , then we moved to germany n shortly after he got into wow .. coupling that with me being trapped in a area out of my element with nowhere to go n him coming home late all the time n just playing that all the time we started to fight alot. we had other issues but the emotional abandonment that was there n coupling it with him being glued to that after he got home it was just .. it was a bad time. it wasn't the games fault it was his , in the end he was a cheating dog but there was definitely a point in the relationship that i felt he loved the games more than me ... oddly enough i'm sure given how our marriage ended i was right ... but given hes on his 4th wife last i knew ( i was first) clearly he has loved games more even if it isn't 'games'. .... i'm in a better place now , now i have a better man n while he likes games he likes other stuff too , usually when we grumble at each other involving games its cause i wanna be left alone to play something or him being dumb in minecraft lol.

I know it's been a while, but I'm posting because I am going through a breakup just because of the video games and casino games. Somehow my GF thinks I'm stupid and arrogant and that the fact I play any games (even if I make lots of money on that) proves all of that and I pay no attention to her (that's not true, we go out every 2 days and we see each other every day). Why on earth are these people so unpleased with what and who they have? I earn money on playing games vigorslot and filming streams, isn't that a dream? I mean I spend so little time on that and have time and money to do anything we want.)

@bellaprch: Find someone who won't look down on you for liking what you like.

I don't think so. My biggest time playing games were "before" high school, so before most relationship. And then after grad-school which was by definition was after college. The advice I gave my nephew was "play less" video games in high school and college. That are the time to experience the world and fight very hard to socialize with people, even if you find it hard.

From what I've found, it depends on the person you're trying to date. If their the type that cares about how other people see them when it comes to who they're with, then finding out you play video games is usually a deal breaker. But if you're dating someone who isn't trying to be Miss or Mister popular and understands that people have hobbies, they usually won't care, unless you're someone who spends countless hours everyday playing video games and have nothing else going on, like lack of having a job or a social life outside of gaming.

I wasn't a particularly great person at the time, but videogames definitely played a significant role in one of my breakups, considering the person she left me for is someone we both met on World of Warcraft. Not the typical sort of thing you see in this situation, but it was definitely part of it.

Nope, just never started one because of this vice.