My copy of Rock Band has arrived, and I m immediately red-faced, ashamed to call myself a grown man. The box is nearly four feet tall and two feet wide, the size of a small refrigerator. It weighs as much as a small child. My first thought upon seeing this monstrosity: “How the hell am I going to hide this from my wife?” Rock Band is the next evolution of the single plastic-guitar kitsch of Guitar Hero .

The idea s the same — you have to mash buttons in time with the music — but instead of a lead guitar, you get to hammer on color-marked drums, sing into a microphone, and noodle on the bass. Four people can play at once. The complete band is $170. And it’s going to royally piss off my significant other. See, she detests videogames.

The game boxes don’t bother her — they look like DVDs and DVDs are for grown-ups — but in her eyes, there’s no excuse for a thirty-something man to have an ever-expanding collection of candy-colored plastic guitars. (One plastic guitar is an anomaly. Three of them, a microphone, and a drum kit is a pattern that says, Creepy dude with no kids over here! Hello little boy! Would you like a ride in my van! ) Now of course, I m not alone. I’m the classic video gamer: Male. Aged 21 to 35.

Sedentary. Likes spending disposable income on ways to keep my mind distracted. And like many others, I love Guitar Hero III , mostly because of the rush I feel when I m shredding, trying to keep up with an impossible onslaught of power-pellet colors. But then my wife will walk in the room, and I feel like a kid caught with his toy dinosaurs spread all over the floor. But I’m not alone there, either.