Video games can bring friends together.

But it can also tear them apart.

We’ve seen what happens when a couple shares a game and one beats it without the other during the Thanksgiving holiday; it wasn’t pretty, but they didn’t break up, presumably because they share other common bonds besides games.

Recently, I was faced with a similar dilemma, and I had to make a confession this week to my co-worker and friend, Multiplayer’s Jason Mitchell: over the holiday break, I finished “Crackdown,” a co-op game we played together a few months back, without him.

Read our exchanges below…

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What do you do when you find out the person who you’ve been sharing a video game with has been playing that game without you?

When I found out that MTV News copy editor Katie Byrne was having just this issue with “Super Mario Galaxy” and her boyfriend, I asked her to write a piece for the blog.

Did her boyfriend break an unspoken gaming rule? Here’s Katie…

When in a relationship, a lot of times “mine” becomes “ours.”

Sometimes that can be quite convenient, like when “Super Mario Galaxy” was released a couple of weeks ago and instead of paying 50 bucks for it, I only paid 25.

The day my boyfriend, Dan, and I got the game home and unwrapped it, a few decisions had to be made about how we would split our purchase. We decided we’d explore the new “Mario” adventure together under his Mii and take turns playing the different levels. When one of us needed a drink break, the other took over. When the phone rang, the controls were handed off. When a really cool world popped up, we each took a stab at it. When friends came over, we gave them some time with the game. All was going well, and we had amassed 19 stars as a team.

Then Thanksgiving arrived. I headed to my parents’ Wii-free home to feed myself all the turkey and stuffing I could handle instead of feeding star bits to Hungry Lumas. The day after Thanksgiving, I received this picture message on my phone:

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