I love asking questions almost as much as I love listening to answers. Last week at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (aka “E3", aka “Electronic Three”), I got to do both of those things.
I asked E3 attendees three mildly stupid questions about video games. Here’s a video of several responses to the second question: “Which video game character would you choose as a roommate?”
I asked dozens of E3 attendees this question because, well, I’ve just moved to New York City, and I have been sleeping on a friend’s sofa for a couple of weeks while I look for an apartment of my own. So I have “living situation” on my mind.
By talking to E3 attendees about roommates, I learned a number of fascinating details about what people consider ideal qualities of a co-habitor. I also re-learned why I prefer living alone: most responses indicated that the respondent not only wanted a roommate who was clean, they wanted a roommate who would do all of the cleaning and also help them with whatever they needed help with. Hmm. So yeah, “which video game character would you like as a roommate?” proved to be a springboard into a conversation about which video game character would be the most vulnerable to hygienic passive aggression in a domestic setting.
What is my own personal answer to this question? Heck, I don’t know. A couple months ago, as a sort of weird joke, I Twitch-streamed myself and my friend Alex Jaffe writing a listicle entitled “These Videogame Characters Would Make Terrible Roommates”, so maybe that’s of interest. Here’s one of the items from that list:
Any protagonist from an Assassin’s Creed game would be a terrible roommate.
They’d keep jumping up on top of stuff in the house! His normal walking speed is so slow that you just know he’s going to pull the right trigger to be running everywhere: except the only way to run is in parkour mode, where he will Velcro onto literally any object. This dude is going to be on top of the refrigerator all the god darn time. He’s going to be like a kitten in a tree. He’s going to love being everywhere, because it’s so much more fun than that slow walk. He’s going to be bumping into you everywhere. He’s going to occupy every molecule of your space at pretty much all times.
He’s going to probably want to sleep in a bale of hay. Bales of hay remind the Assassin of his home. The guy loves bales of hay. He’s going to have a big bale of hay in his room and he’s going to sleep completely inside of that bale of hay. He’s going to be leaving scraps of hay all over your house. There’s going to be hay in your sofa. There’s going to be hay in your soup.
The first question was “What was the first video game you purchased with your own money?” Yesterday I posted a video of responses to that question.
There’s one question left — yep! Come back tomorrow!