"Absolutely no Nintendo in this house."

That was our household rule when I was growing up. My mother held out for four years against all our nagging. She knew the negatives and therefore did not like video games.

Then as fate would have it, my father took us to the store while she was out of town. Soon, she returned home to find us crowded around a brand new Nintendo, busily watching Mario bounce around the screen.

While I am not a regular player of video games, I grew up with brothers who became well versed in the virtual gaming world. I'm a video game nerd by proxy. After spending time with them, I could name all 26 characters of Super Smash Brothers in the order of which they appeared in the game.

Now in college, I live with three girls, none of who play video games regularly. As a result, my knowledge of gaming has plummeted. I hadn't thought much about the recreational differences between male and female students until this weekend.

I was at my guy friends' apartment and watched as they enthusiastically played Halo 3. I attempted to follow the action, only to find that I no longer cared about its complicated intricacies.

Something I felt so apathetic about resulted in hours of fun for them. They entered a catatonic state, their sole focus on the TV. This morning one of those guys told me he set off the smoke alarm when he turned his attention from cooking to a game being played.

I discussed this with my roommate, who said she was also disinterested in games. Like me, she preferred socializing with friends.

Do the games inhibit one's social life? Do people who play games for hours on end become socially mature at a later age? These were among the questions we pondered.

Just as we concluded that guys must see something in video games girls don't, we stumbled upon our mutual love for The Sims. Soon our conversation turned to the different lives our simulated families led.

As neither of us had played in more than a year, we reminisced about the countless weekend hours spent playing.

Then it hit us -- we should make a Sim family of our apartment and the guys' apartment and see how they interact.

So we made a pact. She would finish her homework and I would write this column, then it would be time to play The Sims.

Obviously there are some flaws to our original theory. Either way, I'm going to spend the remaining hours of my weekend in the same catatonic state as my guy friends ... and I'll probably thoroughly enjoy it.

Adrienne Fedyna is a junior majoring in advertising/public relations and is an arts in-depth reporter for The Daily Collegian. Her e-mail address is aef5015@psu.edu.