‘Mario Kart’ Helped Millennial Players’ Relationships Get Better, Survey Finds

Many millennial players who spend time playing video games with their girlfriends or boyfriends say the time spent playing together helps their relationship, a survey finds.

According to a survey conducted by internet service CenturyLink, over a thousand millenial video game players aged between 18 and 24 find playing games like “Mario Kart” and “Call of Duty” together with a girlfriend or romantic partner actually helps to build that relationship.

Positive effect

The survey, conducted to see whether PC and console gaming had a positive or negative impact on millenial’s romantic relationships, found that certain games positively affect such relationships. In fact, one in three respondents (about 33.3%) said games have a positive impact on their relationships.

The respondents named three specific titles that positively affect their romantic relationships. First is “Mario Kart,” that game where Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach and the others race against each other in colorful race tracks while picking up things that can help them take the lead.

The survey noted that the fact that “Mario Kart” helps the respondents the most is “weird but true.” It’s a game about competition, after all, and players, romantic as they can be, can’t join hands in co-op gameplay to defeat other racers in any round.

Next to “Mario Kart” are two more titles that are just as surprising: “Call of Duty,” a first-person shooter where players can either go together or go against each other; and “Skyrim,” a huge open world role-playing game that only offered single-player campaigns until Bethesda launched “Skyrim Together,” a multiplayer mod that allowed players to go on quests as a group.

Interesting Findings

Aside from these, the survey also discovered a few things that players and video game creators and developers would find interesting:

• First, female players who joined the survey play more PC games than they do console games. Male players, on the other hand, are the complete opposite: they play more on consoles than their PCs.
• Second, more than 9% of respondents admitted that video games affected their relationships both positively and negatively. It simply doesn’t work for everyone.
• Third, video games don’t affect older people’s romantic relationships the same way they affect younger players. While 52% of respondents aged 18 to 24 say games affect their relationships positively, less than 10% of people aged 55 share the same view.
• Lastly, of the 1,000 respondents, only 42 said playing video games led to a breakup.