The Addon Junkie

When I first heard about GameCrush I’ll be honest with you, I laughed a little. I considered writing something here but I honestly thought it’d be a funny little blip on the gaming community’s radar for a while and then it’d just go away. But it’s not going away…

For those of you not aware, GameCrush is sort of a dating service where male gamers pay to play the games they love with (presumably) female gamers. I understand that, in the gaming communities I’m part of at least, there is an overwhelming male presence, do we really care so much that we’re willing to pay? We’re not talking about actual dates here, we’re talking about running BFD on an alt. Worst of all it’s expensive. It’s insulting enough that they want us to pay girls to play games with us, but they charge in 10 minute increments and their fees work out to almost $40 an hour. I don’t make $40 an hour at my day job and they want me to fork that much over to play a game with someone just because they have a vagina – keep in mind that you’re not actually meeting the girl, you’re playing a game over the internet for $40 an hour.

So you can see why I thought this would be a fad, why it would just fade into nothing and in a few years we’d vaguely recall that silly startup with a crazy idea and laugh. I never imagined that there could possibly be a real market for $40/hr game dates. Apparently I was wrong. GameCrush’s web site now reads:

“The GameCrush Public Beta is temporarily unavailable due to the incredible user response. We are adding new servers to provide players with the best PlayDate experience possible. Games with GameCrush PlayDates start at $6.60 for ten minutes.”

The response was so immense that they crashed. They offered gamers a chance to play games with girls for $39.60/hr and were so flooded with responses that they crashed. What the hell… I’ve always been proud of my hobbies. I’m a proud gamer, proud hacker and proud HAM but for a brief moment there I actually felt ashamed.

Let me make this as clear as humanly possible: I met my fiancee playing World of Warcraft and I love her very much. We have a real relationship that began in a game. I believe that games are not just time-wasting nonsense worlds where I pretend to be a Draenai Paladin who regularly saves the world. Games are a social construct, they’re an imaginary situation that allows us to do and be whatever we want, and the choices we make within a game speak volumes about us. The fact that I’m a tank and she is a healer is no coincidence – it speaks to who we are at the core. Our behavior within the game also speaks to who we truly are. Want to know who your real friends are? Play games with them. When you always have that built-in excuse “it’s just a game” then very little can be considered bad behavior. The way people behave when they are free, truly free, to do whatever they want speaks to their character more than anything you’ll find out in Starbucks or on FaceBook. Real relationships can grow from virtual ones. But not when you’re paying for them. If you’re paying to play with a girl and that’s all you want or expect then fine, spend your time and money however you want; but if you’re looking for something meaningful or lasting you’re looking for a wife in a brothel.