Â"You wanna go somewhere?Â"

After four and a half years with my gamer, I have learned to recognize what this means. It means that we are taking a trip to EB. For some reason that I donÂ't fully understand, but has to do with establishing dominance among his fellow gamers, Certis likes me to Go With when he goes game shopping. It is certainly not because of my usefulness on such trips – I wander the store looking vaguely at old Playstation titles and wishing the EB hadnÂ't got rid of their toy section. I can only surmise that actually having a member of the opposite sex with you in a gaming store is like wearing a Purple Heart at a veteranÂ's convention. Granted, Certis is already an Alpha gamer. As the co-webmaster of a gaming site that boasts a healthy forum community and a steadily increasing ratio of hits per day, he has the honour and the burden of a recognizable name among the online gamer population, as well as being able to hold his own during online bouts of Counterstrike and Ravenshield. We wonÂ't mention ESPN FootballÂ"…

Still, he enjoys having me there, returning periodically in my wanderings to observe with bright eyes and slightly parted lips his mano-a-mano discussions with Ted* the EB manager.

Â"Well, of course SoulCaliber2 is doing a lot better for the Gamecube than for the other platforms – Link is just a more recognizable figure than Spawn or Hitachi.Â" Â"Nintendo needed this game to do well. They need to show third party developers that given a good game, the Gamecube can outperform the other two in sales, or they are just going to get slowly crushed.Â"

I can follow these discussions. I am not the innocent girly-girl I was four years ago. Still, I rarely contribute much to the talk. I stand off to the side, a little behind Certis, glancing around and occasionally reaching out to hold his hand. He often tugs me a little closer when I do this, a possessive little gesture that somehow is incredibly endearing.

And itÂ's not like I donÂ't get a kind of boost out of the whole thing. In a game store, IÂ'm a big fish in a tiny, male-dominated pond. IÂ'm the pinnacle of what a gamer wants. I know the difference between an RPG and a FPS, I have breasts, and IÂ'm willing to hang around in the shifting crowd of pimply, mostly-under-twenty guys who, when they get anywhere near me, stare at the ground and talk in these loud, slightly high voices about the respective virtues of whatever game they have snatched off the shelf. This is amusing when it happens to be a Barbie Fashion Simulator.

Now, donÂ't get me wrong. I donÂ't kid myself that IÂ'm any great knockout. IÂ'm okay looking – I clean up nice, and I fully expect to knock CertisÂ's socks off, come W-day – in the gaming store, however, I feel like a beauty queen, and Certis squires me in and out like he feels it, too.

ItÂ's kind of nice.

*Names are changed to protect the innocent from company censure.

- hoochie