When I first saw this post on the Animal Crossing subreddit, I didn’t immediately clock what was wrong. It was a picture of a Switch with cracked screen, scrambled text, and several bits of metal wiring poking out of the sides. At first glance, it just seems like a Nintendo console that went through the wringer. But as soon as I read the line, “my husband destroyed my Switch in a fit of rage,” I put all the pieces together, even before reading the rest of the short bit of text. This user was actually posting because they wanted advice on restoring their Animal Crossing island, but most commenters recognized that it was a cry for help from someone inside of an abusive relationship.
While abuse can happen in many ways, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly half of all people in the United States have experienced psychological aggression from their intimate partner, and one in three women (and one in four men) have experienced physical violence, rape, and/or stalking from an intimate partner. Domestic abuse, also known as intimate partner violence, is a depressingly common occurrence that many people may experience over their lifetime.
Even with these kinds of statistics, there may be some people — and maybe some who are reading this right now — wondering what a broken console has to do with abuse. Others might also be wondering why this person is still in a marriage with this man. “Why didn’t they just leave?” is a common refrain when people hear about someone in a relationship that involves incidents of poor treatment like, say, an intentionally broken Switch — but also towards people in relationships that turn fatally violent. The contours of abuse can wear down a victim from the inside, however, making it hard to recognize and even harder to try and pull oneself out of in time.
Domestic abuse can encompass a variety of behaviors from an intimate partner that are designed to intimidate and trap their victim, and can include chipping away at their self esteem, controlling their finances, coercing them into sex, or physically assaulting them. The relevant point here is that it can also include destruction of the victim’s property. According to D. Kelly Weisberg in UC at San Francisco’s “Domestic Violence Report,” an abuser could use property destruction to “convey a not-so-subtle message that the offender is capable of wreaking similar violence on the victim,” even if it never escalates.
While researching this piece, it staggered me how many posts on just Reddit going back many years pertained to gaming consoles (or even their save files) being broken or tampered with, mostly by romantic partners. Many of the stories were from women, and often were specifically about Nintendo Switches. (Over half of Nintendo Switch owners are women, and given that the Switch is one of the bestselling consoles of all time, it makes sense that it would show up so often in these examples.) Gaming is a passion that we gamers sink love and time into, with our various gaming devices as conduits. It is depressingly unsurprising, then, that those things would be targeted by an abusive partner in a fit of rage.
Games and gaming culture have become more communal because of the Internet and social media; this hasn’t always been a positive, but the mountain of supportive but adamant replies to the original Switch owner about how this was abusive and that they should leave their husband gave me a shred of optimism. Abusers often cut off victims from their friends and family, and in doing so, create a suffocating new normal. What this Redditor did by reaching out to try and fix their Switch inadvertently became a lifeline, because it may have finally rung some alarm bells that they’d been trained out of hearing all along.
If you think you or someone you know is in a situation like described in this article, please know that you are not alone, and that you can reach out to any number of organizations or people you know to get help to leave safely. Consoles are replaceable, but you (or someone you care about) are not, and you deserve to enjoy your games in safety and peace.
The U.S. National Domestic Violence Hotline offers confidential support and crisis intervention for free, in over 200 languages. You can call (1-800-799-SAFE), chat (thehotline.org), or text (START to 88788).
Nico Deyo is a feminist media critic who lives in the Midwest with her cat and has written for a variety of publications including Vice Games, Paste, Kotaku and Polygon. Her writing focuses heavily on how games view gender and sexuality.
