I know that dumping on people who enjoy playing video games and branding them as immature, useless slobs is fashionable, but this is really going too far:
A Utah woman became so annoyed by her husband’s addiction to video games that she put him up for sale on Craigslist. Kyle Baddley, 22, spent so much time playing the recently released “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ that wife, Alyse, warned her mother-in-law: “I’m going to sell your son on Craigslist.” The 21-year-old soon made good on the threat, according to ABC News, by posting a classified ad on her local version of the website. “I am selling my 22-year-old husband. He enjoys eating and playing video games all day. Easy to maintain, just feed and water every 3-5 hours,” her post on the Logan, Utah, Craigslist site read. Kyle Baddley’s future home “must have Internet and space for gaming,” the ad continues. “If acceptable replacement is offered will trade.” . . .
Kyle Baddley’s father Scott said his son has since cut down on his “Modern Warfare” time and was planning a Thanksgiving trip to Florida with his wife.
Contrary to popular wisdom, people who play video games are the opposite of immature. Video games are a powerful compensatory technique for people in stressful situations. Those who play video games engage in psychological hygiene that allows them to release their anxieties and frustrations onto a game instead of onto their family members.
The wife in this situation is the immature person because she hasn’t learnede to cope with her frustrations in a productive way and decided to ridicule and shame her husband publicly instead. This kind of tells me exactly what it is he is escaping from through his gaming.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Contrary to popular wisdom, people who play video games are the opposite of immature.”
Apparently you have never been on WoW chat.
Still, that’s a dick move on the wife’s part.
Personalnote: I love role-playing games, first-person shooters, and stealth simulators. The GTA series is probably my fave (the beating hookers thing notwithstanding) because it combines all of these things. I wish there were more female protagonists in these games though. Women can wear cool camo jackets, ride bitchin motorcycles, make sardonic quips, and silently garrote gangsters too, Rockstar!
“Those who play video games engage in psychological hygiene that allows them to release their anxieties and frustrations onto a game”
As I tell my partner sometimes I just feel the need to virtually blow away some virtual people with no moral consequences.
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Exactly. Whenever I was upset about my thesis advisor’s criticism of my writing, I’d just unleash a series of nuclear strikes against poor, confused medieval warriors in Civilization IV, and then I’d be as good as new.
My husband started playing a lot during his long unemployment, and it’s been a great thing for him and for me. It also raised his feminist awareness to read those discussion forums of gamer geeks.
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If you enjoy the GTA series, might I suggest that you try out the latest installment of the Saint’s Row series? It is twice as much fun as GTA IV and features a heavily customizable main protagonist.
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Heck, I’m thirtymumble years old and I still play Mario. It’s a great stress relief and provides some much needed down time, and I don’t think anybody I know would call me immature for it. (I also play grown-up games like Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed, but every so often, I feel the need for some good old fashioned Super Mario 3.)
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I’ve been playing this Treasures of Montezuma game on my Kindle obsessively in the recent weeks. It really helps me to get through the last weeks of classes. It’s the best game ever because you can’t lose, so there is zero stress. You can only make your great score even better. How cool is that?
The only problem is that I am at the last 3 levels already, and then what? 🙂
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I like games that I’m not very good at, because it relieves the stress of succeeding in life. (:
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“I like games that I’m not very good at, because it relieves the stress of succeeding in life. (:”
– I’m the opposite. I love games where I cannot lose because that’s reassuring to me.
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OMG I have been starving for old-school SMB3 or SMW. Ima have to dig out my SNES once the semester’s over.
Does anybody have a PS3? What do you think? My PS2 finally gave up and I’m tentatively considering the nextgen systems but most of my games are Playstation. PS3 is backwards compatible, right? Is there anything really worth playing on PS3 or am I better off just picking up another PS2 for fifty bucks?
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OK, this sounds more confusing to me than even Butler’s texts. 🙂
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Be careful with backwards compatibility!
The initial series of the PS3 was backwards compatible with the PS2, but the later and less expensive version had that feature cut out. Also, it is rumored that Sony is patching the old backward compatible models so that they are not compatible anymore, so they can start re-releasing PS2 titles as HD remakes.
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I still have a PS2, but I hardly play anything on it. I have an XBox 360 for all the awesome stuff and a Wii for the Nintendo stuff.
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I get the impression that his level was more along the lines of an addiction. Would you be saying the same thing if his addiction was cocaine or alcohol. Probably not.
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I would definitely say that drug and alcohol addiction are caused by very low self-esteem. If a person develops such addictions while in a relationship, one needs to ask whether that relationship lowers the person’s self-esteem.
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Cloudsoooooooooooooooooong.
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Sounds like an update to Hardy’s _The Mayor of Castorbridge_ to me.
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Wow. Not only is that reeeeaally not funny, it’s probably really dangerous, too.
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Selling the husband, you mean?
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Hi Clarissa,
I’ve gotta say, even though this woman seems not to know how to communicate effectively with her husband in regards to this situation (or know the beneficial entertainment in playing alongside him, as is a common case), as a guy I think her actions are pretty funny. If he’s good-natured, I don’t know that he’d feel “shamed,” necessarily; and furthermore, there are many much worse ways she could have alerted him to her agitation. To each his own, though! I guess it’s nice knowing that you’re not the type to sell your potential husband, heh.
– Greg
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They are 22 respectively 21 years old?
That is… soon. I mean marriage is the promise to stay together for the rest of your life (if everything goes fine, that is). I don’t even know what I want to do with the rest of my life, how should I know with who to spend it? Also, that is an awful lot of planing ahead if you ask me.
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Oh, that’s nothing. I got married for the first time when I was 19. (See the post on tolerating barbarity.)
Many people get married very young to escape from overbearing parents and gain independence. Then, of course, they move on from each other.
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What she did was way over the top, but I can understand that she would be frustrated with her husband’s gaming. I have seen a lot of men lose their jobs and girlfriends because they prioritized gaming rather than you know, working, sleeping, and maintaining a relationship.
However, I wouldn’t generalize gaming as immature. Maybe back in the 80s and 90s when games were more marketed towards kids and teens. Times have changed now, and video games are made and marketed to adults more than ever, and that is ok.
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It could easily have been intended to be “funny” or “cute” on the wife’s part, but in practice it seems more like public humiliation as a form of emotional abuse.
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I recall this one from a few weeks back. If she was doing this as a way to display his immaturity I have to ask who the immature one is. The one doing something that the other feels is a problem or that other who doesn’t mention it but instead pretends to sell them off.
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Hi Greg. My husband is the best, so I’m definitely keeping him, video games and all. 🙂
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I actually think advertising him on the Craiglist was an expression of good humor and out of the box thinking on her part… Complaining about him to his mother bothers me much more.
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“Complaining about him to his mother bothers me much more.”
-Yes, I can’t disagree with that. Freaky.
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Could you expand on the topic of psychological hygiene? As for games, I recommend Warcraft. It is awesome.
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I blogged about it before here. But I think you are right, the topic needs to be explored further. I will keep posting some basic techniques of psychological hygiene. Thanks for the suggestion!
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I like video games and don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with them, but I know many people who for whatever reason can’t control themselves when it comes to gaming. Some of them play for hours a day to the point that they have to choose between doing their schoolwork and sleeping (they usually choose the former). It’s hard to accept this as normal.
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Choosing between sleep and doing other activities is nothing new. How many college students choose do their schoolwork and then go drink any particular night of the week and wake up for class the next morning having only gotten 4 hours in (or don’t get up; or wake up and go to class sick and unfocused)? Or, how many get back from class and do intramurals in the evening, forcing their schoolwork to keep them up until 1am when they have an 8am class the next day?
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OH MAN! I have some friends who live in Logan, I wonder if they know these people.
Seriously though, if she was trying to display her husbands immaturity she definitely went about it the wrong way. She could have just talked to him about it. Also, in my own experience, the older the person gets the more their gaming goes down. My husband and I are both 23 and even just last year he played a lot more than he does now.
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