My Girlfriend’s Secret Save Data

Top Spin is a pretty good tennis game released for the Xbox in 2003 that I am only okay at. My girlfriend Brooke, who had it as a child but hadn't played in years, is extremely good at it. She’s a self-described casual gamer who plays ten minutes of Stardew Valley before bed. I am a games journalist who plays games for extended periods of time for money. And I get my ass kicked every time we play Top Spin.

For context: My girlfriend and I have been together for eight years. We started dating in college, where we worked together on school plays, rehearsing long hours into the night, and eventually came to the conclusion that we wanted to spend unscripted time together. I was on a bit of a gaming sabbatical during this time, focusing more on being a bright, young workaholic, but we made time to play through Breath of the Wild when it launched. After undergrad, we were briefly long-distance when I lived in California for grad school and she lived in Wisconsin for her job. When I finished grad school and she felt like leaving that job, we finally moved in together in 2021.

While we had both lived with roommates before and were no strangers to the concept of cohabitation, this was the first time either of us had lived with a romantic partner. Among all the usual novel experiences that came with that move — organizing closet space, figuring out how to share a kitchen, and gently nudging me awake when I snored, among others — our respective gaming habits collided, revealing unexpected differences in our virtual experiences and the ways we play. Living with someone means changing your game schedule, and it also means seeing games, as it makes you see so many things, in a whole new light.

When I lived alone, I did most of my gaming in the evening. I’d come home from work, make a simple, less-than-healthy dinner (Totinos’ square pizzas, my beloved, thank you for all the good times), and then sink many hours into whatever game or games I had on my plate. Brooke is a more infrequent, light-dose gamer, checking in on her Animal Crossing island at the end of the day and rarely making time to play otherwise unless something specific has locked down her interest. After moving in together, I suddenly felt self-conscious about gaming too much and seeming like I was ignoring her (though to her credit, she has never once voiced this complaint). 

Gaming was a solitary endeavor for most of my life; most of my interactions about the medium took place on online forums or during online play session with friends across the country. When Brook and I lived apart, she’d ask if I was playing anything good, and I’d tell her, but she usually didn’t investigate further or go out of her way to play things she couldn’t see. But when she moved in, gaming became a cooperative activity for the first time since my teenage years, when I stayed up all night with friends playing Double Dash on the GameCube. “What are you playing?” became a familiar statement in the apartment, often followed by “Can I try?” Now, she’s much more tuned into new releases and the gaming subculture; Brooke’s TikTok algorithm has even shifted more toward games. She often sees sees videos about new games that we might like, sends messages about rumors for the follow-up to the Switch, and questions about when, if ever, Haunted Chocolatier, the follow-up game from the developer of Stardew Valley, will finally be released. I introduced her to different game news outlets and kept her up to date on industry rumors.

Despite being interested in what I’m playing, she doesn't always want to play the same games. She bounced off of Elden Ring in record time after running into the devious Tree Sentinel, the over-leveled antagonist that haunts an early game area. You’re meant to avoid the Tree Sentinel until much later, when you’re strong enough to fight back, but Brooke saw that gilded bastard and assumed, not unreasonably, that if he was in her way, he should be cut down. After a handful of tries, she decided that she and Elden Ring had fundamentally different philosophies about how games should work.

(Brooke also never worked the freelance game writer beat, so for her there’s no tinge of clocking in when she jumps into a new game, something else I envy. )

One of the first games I started playing after Brooke moved in was Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. I would run around the densely-packed levels, trying to hide from enemies and inevitably going loud (i.e, shooting people) when stealth failed. Though Brooke was not thrilled by the byzantine lore of Kojima’s final Metal Gear, she was enthralled by the open-ended nature of play. She didn’t have the weight of endless discourse and controversy about Kojima and Konami buzzing in her head; she did not care about Ocelot or The Patriots or any other proper nouns with implied significance – there was just something about the extremely immersive, open-ended elements of The Phantom Pain that really ignited her mind. She developed a unique strategy for infiltrating enemy bases: run in, kill one or two guys, and immediately run away and wait for the heat to die down before trying again. It wasn’t quick, but it was thorough, and more importantly, it was her way of playing. I would never think to play like that, and she would never play the way I did. I never get tired of seeing how she views the same sandbox I do in a completely different way, unburdened by the accumulation of so many hours of my own gaming experiences and habits.

Brooke has her own history with games, too. When we visited her family for Thanksgiving one year, we found her old Xbox, a aspect of her life I was not previously aware of, and I heard about her experience playing her parents’ original NES (which we sadly could not locate). I had never had an Xbox growing up, and compared to Nintendo or PlayStation, it was a corner of game history I knew little about. I couldn’t believe it had fallen in our laps, and it hadn’t really — it had just surfaced from Brooke’s past. We brought that old Xbox home, along with a few of her old games, each carrying with them years gone by like flies trapped in amber.

Upon returning, we fired up the console and popped in 2003 tennis sim Top Spin; I was eager to witness a bygone era, Brooke eager to reclaim it. We went straight to the multiplayer mode — Brooke wanted to share what Top Spin was and what made it worth remembering. For all my talk of Elden Ring and Metal Gear Solid V, those are single player games that only let Brooke and me observe each other and our differences, which came into sharper focus when pushed head to head on the same screen. I can be competitive when I play, but I’ve never been a raging gamer in any capacity. So when Brooke ran up game after game on me in Top Spin, my immediate emotional response wasn’t fury — it was slack-jawed surprise.

Brooke might as well have been playing a different game; she could move across the entire virtual tennis court in no time and hit the ball exactly where I couldn’t receive it. She would offer me constructive criticism, walk me through what I might be doing wrong, and I would listen. Then we’d play again, and I’d get washed again. I think I’ve scored on her in Top Spin around 5 times total, and we’ve played a lot of Top Spin in the almost two years since we first got that fabled Xbox. Every few months I’ll fancy myself ready for the challenge. I’ll play solo, practice a few rounds, get my confidence up, ask Brooke if she’d like to spar, and then get my dreams snapped more thoroughly than Zendaya’s knee in Challengers.

I like playing Top Spin with Brooke not because I think I’m finally going to win — I let that go a long time ago — but because I like seeing her in her element. I like being witness to greatness. I like seeing the culmination of the childhood that involved her playing so much of this tennis game after school or on weekends. I like having a snapshot of something that was so significant to the most important person in my life. Witnessing the muscle memory that lets her dominate on the virtual tennis court is like seeing all those years coming to the present.

After we obtained the Xbox, I wanted to rebuild as much of Brooke’s old gaming library as I could. In scouring eBay listings for used Xbox discs, Brooke mentioned one particular favorite of her childhood: a 2003 console adaptation of JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit. You could be forgiven for never having heard of this Hobbit game; I certainly never had. It was made by Inevitable Entertainment, aka Midway Studios Austin, who in their eight year lifespan made an entirety of four games before shutting down.

To hear Brooke tell it, this was an unsung classic of that console generation. She thrilled me with a memory of renting it from Blockbuster many years ago and being spellbound by an open-world Shire, full of elves and dwarves to befriend, along with more combat-focused segments. She made it sound like a combination of Harvest Moon 64 and Super Mario 64, and my interest was piqued. It was important to her, and even though I had no illusions that understanding it would make me better at Top Spin, I wanted to understand her, so I wanted to play The Hobbit.

Imagine my surprise when, after scoring a second-hand copy for $6 at a local flea market — don’t shop for old games online! Go to flea markets and buy them from people who aren’t re-selling, price-gouging vultures! A better world is possible! — I brought it home, booted it up… and found out that you’re only in the shire for around the first 45 minutes. Then Gandalf whisks Bilbo away on his grand quest and the game proceeds with the plot of Tolkien’s novel. The Hobbit (2003) is an ultimately pretty linear game, but The Shire is mostly just a tutorial area. So much for my open-world adventures in Middle Earth. 

For what it’s worth, The Hobbit is actually a solid game. It does everything a Zelda ripoff of the era should do competently, with fun puzzles and combat that doesn’t get in the way. If that sounds like faint praise, it’s only because The Hobbit is just competent. It is exactly fine; it’s not too hard, it’s not too long, and the Xbox-era Bilbo is adorable. Graphically, the most striking thing is how thoroughly it rejects any similarity to the Peter Jackson films. This is a storybook-ass Middle Earth, so you leave those Hollywood pretensions at the door.

I could easily see how Brooke was so enamored more than 20 years ago. As she replayed, and watched me play, I saw the memories flooding back. She’d come across a puzzle and say, “Oh, I remember how to do this,” speedrunning through each challenge in her reverie. To a youngster’s mind, that tutorial area must have felt like it stretched on forever. I may not have found the gaming classic she remembered, but I had found something more precious: the formative gaming memories of someone playing their cherished, favorite game from childhood. In her joy, I got to see the seed planted in her youth bloom into fond memories for so many years. Like Top Spin, I was experiencing something I’d never had context for before, a game played in a way I’d never seen it. Gaming is not always about getting to the objective as directly as possible. Sometimes it’s about goofing around in Hobbit Town for hours instead of getting on with the rest of the adventure. It’s as if, for once, the right analog stick does something else. Not bad for $6.

Living with my girlfriend, I’ve been given the gift of seeing a whole new way of thinking about gaming, and a whole perspective to witness, day in and day out, that doesn’t have the same preconceived notions that I do about what makes “efficient” play. And

Gaming, like everything else in my life, has expanded and changed for the better with Brooke in the picture. I cook different (much better, much healthier, sorry Totino's) meals now. I watch different shows. I go to different restaurants and events and farmers markets and museums. I get out more. I’m more social, because no matter where we go, or what we do, I’m at least hanging out with her. And I don't just play games differently, I play different games. We played through It Takes Two last year, which requires you play with someone else. Her recommendations and questions have brought us to new games I’d never find on my own, like Cult of the Lamb, which had us building competing cults, or Fields of Mistria, which got us both way too deep into early access farm simulation. We might play differently, but I am so happy to learn her new ways of playing, and to get the chance to get used to them and internalize these new rhythms of life until they’re just as familiar as my old habits. That’s the joy of playing with someone else. That’s the joy of living with someone you want to see every day. 

The world isn’t just doubled with Brooke, it’s squared — an exponential increase in the way things can be, the things we can do, and the ways we perceive what we’re doing. It’s a good game, living with someone you love, and it’s a long one. I can proudly say I’m doing better as a romantic partner than I ever did in Top Spin.