Boys Toys

Toys. Yes, that’s right, I said toys. You can never be too old for them. OK, so maybe we’re no longer fascinated by a couple of plastic cars shooting round a track, fake guns or scabby old teddy bears, but young people such as us can still pass the time with toys. The majority of our toys are small boxes filled with wiring we’ll never understand and that you have to insert thin, round sheets of plastic into in order for them to work, but they’re toys nonetheless.

A large proportion of York’s student population will no doubt have spent the last couple of days glued to an Xbox, Playstation 3 or Gamecube. I am no different. But my time spent scoring mesmerising goals or beating the crap out of some pimp who dared mess with my boss (all within the realms of fantasy, of course) raised a serious gender issue in my mind.

Before I go into this I must admit that this is slightly weird. Playing some inane computer game should not really make anyone think so deeply. But I’m a thoughtful person. And on the week that hundreds of people (mostly men) queued around the block just to make sure they could be amongst the first to shell out forty-odd quid on Grand Theft Auto IV, I thought it might be worth taking a look at the difference between lads and lasses when it comes to ‘grown-up’ toys like these.

My male housemates and I drive our female housemates crazy with our near incessant Football Manager, Guitar Hero or GTA sessions. These are all stereotypical male games. What man doesn’t want to lead his football team to glory, rock out the chords in front of thousands of fans or beat seven bells out of some guy walking down the street? Hell, I’d love to do all of those things, if I was up to it or could do it legally.

So in at least one, very stereotypical way, a man’s choice of computer game represents a quite expensive but relatively risk-free way of enforcing his masculinity or fulfilling his manly dreams. I’m not suggesting that every man has these aspirations, or that women don’t have them, but simply commenting on the differences between the genders based on gaming in my own household.

When I’m being mercilessly destroyed by my male housemates on Pro Evo or we’re debating whether 4-4-2 is the way to go if one of us is to win the Champions League this year in the in-between world of Football Manager, the female dwellers in our house need to entertain themselves. Again computer games provide the answer. Yet their choice of game is telling, in my view. While the men are playing football or performing a drive-by killing, they choose to play The Sims.

No imaginary league titles or reckless murder for them: they want to build a house, make a person do whatever they like and to see love blossom.

So my house, a microcosm of society, seems to have the most stereotypical gender divide imaginable. The question for me here is whether or not men and women really are so stereotypically divided as is demonstrated by computer games. I don’t pretend to know the answer, it just concerns me that men and women can be so easily pigeonholed in a world where the gender gap is closing in so many areas.

For the sake of household harmony, one of the girls may decide to strap on a guitar and bash out a (frankly awful) rendition of ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ or comment on how the virtual Rooney is better looking than the real thing, while one of us may even stretch to expressing an interest in the type of curtains Mrs Sim has chosen for the living room. But for the most part, the house remains divided. The boys scream at referees who aren’t real and snipe from rooftops while the girls build their dream home and find love for their imaginary people. And neither side really cares a damn about the other.

This observation does not precede a chauvinist statement from me about sissy girls being concerned with houses and babies. It seem this article has no real point at all. If it does anything, I hope it makes you aware of the fundamental differences between the genders. I hope the girls understand the boyish need to shoot, be it with a ball or a gun. I hope us males can accept the feminine need to build a nice house in the suburbs. I hope we can all live in harmony, just as we do up here at Jackson Towers. And above all, I hope that all girls begin to understand that halfway through a police chase in Liberty City is not the time to ask us to open a jar for them.

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