Intro: Why Game?
I've been asking myself a question for the past few weeks, why do I play video games for a hobby? Is it because I am of a generation when video games started to break into the cultural zeitgeist with Mario and Sonic or were it something else that lead me to play games?
Maybe a combination of both?
Who hasn't felt a tinge of regret after spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon shut away from the world with the blinds down playing games? Who hasn't wished they spent a little bit more time reading or maybe checking out that movie that everyone is talking about at the moment?
I know it's not an easy question to answer, when I asked this question to NeoGAF in research for this I did get some quick answers like "it's fun" or "escapism" but a lot of the two hundred plus replies I got were long and detailed and while I can sum why I play games in one word, there is something deeply fascinating to explore if you wish to dig a little deeper.
My Own Personal History With Games
Blessed are the geeks, for they shall inherit the Earth - Matthew 5:13
I was born in the early eighties and cannot remember a time when we didn't have a computer or gaming console in the house I grew up in. My dad had bought a Telesport SD 050C (just rolls off the tongue) back in the late 70's which was basically a Pong knock off console. By the time I was born he had purchased an Atari VCS, the one that looked like it was made of wood. I do have a few flickering memories of the Atari. Just random images of games. I'm not actually sure if I was the one playing them or just watching my Dad and my older brother playing it.
The first video game moment I truly remember is visiting our neighbour's house and watching my friends older brothers play Barbarian on the C64. The bright colours and the sound effects had my complete attention. The game is a one on one fight to the death. You can play against the computer or against each other.
When my brother and I got home we begged our parents to get us a C64. My dad then went down and had a go at the C64 and I guess he must have liked it as when he came back he convinced my mother that buying one would be good for the kids as "it would be able to help them with their homework" I still have no idea how the C64 was meant to do this, but once the system entered the house all knowledge of the homework argument quickly faded and disappeared.
At the stage of my life gaming was something you did with other people. Either my brother and I would play together, either two player games, or if it was a single player game like Last Ninja 2, as soon as you died then pass over the joystick till he died.
I remember playing and finishing games like Double Dragon, Thing Bounces Back, Turrican, Bionic Commando, Platoon, Vendetta, Last Ninja 2 and Rambo First Blood Part 2 as a group of four plus friends all sitting on a couch and simply passing the joystick to the next person when your turn was over.
Then one day my dad came home and told us he had bought a Nintendo game for the Atari, which had since relaunched as the Atari 2600. It was Donkey Kong. It was my first ever experience of hearing the name Mario (not that common a name in Ireland in the 80's) let alone the word Nintendo.
I heard from someone in the school yard that Nintendo was it's own gaming device as was better than Atari, I don't remember the reason why it was better but only that he kept telling everyone that it was cooler to have a Nintendo then an Atari.
I was seven years old at the time and was about to make my first communion, which was a huge deal growing up in Catholic Ireland. But I also knew, due to my brother making his the year before that the first communion was like a second birthday as you got cards and the cards would contain money from family members and I have a lot of aunts and uncles on my mother's side (my dad was an only child). My brother got £60 for his, which to us back then was a nearly a king's ransom. I think my brother spent his on an Irish soccer jersey as Ireland had recently qualified for the European Championship for the first time ever.
I, on the other hand, had my sights set on loftier dreams. I knew what I wanted to do with my communion money, long before I ever held it in my hand. I wanted to buy a Nintendo. I was in Limerick with my mom and asked if I could go to the toy shop to "look around." At the very back of Smyth's Toy Store in Limerick was the game section. I was like a child in wonderland, all these games that I never heard of, and console I didn't even know existed. I asked the person behind the counter how much a Nintendo was and I was told £90 and it came with two games, which would turn out to be Mario and Duck Hunt.
I remember thinking that £90 was way more than I would ever get for my communion and if I didn't get enough then how could I ever get a Nintendo. Sure there may have been a war raging in the Persian Gulf at the time, but this was a real world crisis, well, to my tiny world.
A small sliver of light did lie in the distance. My birthday is in November and if I didn't spend my communion money right away (as was the style at the time) I could join it with my birthday money and then hopefully, even maybe, have just about enough to get a Nintendo just after my birthday.
The communion came, I got £60. When asked what I was going to spend it on I would just say "I haven't decided yet". Had to play it cool and keep those cards close to my chest, for if my parents found out what my master plan was they might say no and all my well laid plans would be ruined.
By the time my birthday came around in November I got £50. So I was over the moon with excitement and joy and running around the house as if I had drunk too much lemonade. I asked if I could go to the Smyths toy store on Saturday. We went on a rainy Saturday and went to the games counter with my mom and asked if they had any Nintendo left. They said yes and I said I wanted one. My mom was someone puzzled, how could I afford this with my birthday money. That's when I played my trump card and pulled a small brown envelope that I had "borrowed" from my dad's work suitcase, and pulled out the three £20 notes. The console was mine.
When we got back to the car with it, I sat in the back seat and held it on my lap. My mom played her trump card when he leant back and said, "You're not allowed to play with that until Christmas." Christmas may have only been three weeks away, but to me, it was a near eternity.
Christmas came and I was allowed to open and play with my new NES. I was the coolest kid in the class when I went back to school in January. Suddenly kids who wouldn't normally give me the time of day wanted to hang out, and always at my house, never at theirs.
From there I lifelong obsession was born with games, and I thought that games would never get better than Super Mario 3, how could they? We heard that someone new had opened in out small Irish village, an arcade? And that there some game called Street Fighter 2 that everyone was raving about.
The arcade was about a ninety-second walk from my back gate. So every Saturday morning my we would always make sure to be up early and be at the arcade at about 9:30 am as it opened at 10 am and we wanted to be first in line to play Street Fighter 2.
After that came the SNES and then the Nintendo 64. I was twelve and was about to go to secondary school. This is where gaming took on a whole new life for me. To cut a long story short I was bullied at school. Verbally first, then by the time I was fifteen, and my older brother had graduated, it had become physical bullying.
The summer before I had bought a Playstation, purely to play Tekken 3, Resident Evil 2 and Metal Gear Solid. So when things got rough at school I would go home and put on my headphones and get lost in games. It was the perfect escape, worlds where I was in control of things. Worlds when I would ignore everything around me and just get lost. My parents didn't think anything of it, as I was always playing games growing up and they just figured that it was just me being weird old me.
When I was in college and the whole Web 2.0 scene came on to the scene. I had just gotten broadband internet and my first ever laptop. No longer would I have to share my computer with everyone else in the house. This is when a whole new world of gaming opened up to me. I started to visit websites like Gamespot, IGN and 1UP to get all my gaming news and reviews. I joined 1UP and started to blog there until the site was closed. But during that time the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 launched and the world of online gaming came knocking at my door. Because of sites like 1UP, I was making new friends and we would play games together. I found out that I wasn't the only one, there were other people out there who went through similar shared experiences with games growing up. From people who grew up in California to people who grew up in Japan. We all had this shared experience of gaming. We would be able to talk about retro games from the NES and SNES era without having to provide context. We all knew it because we were all there.
So that where I am now. Sitting at my desk, which has both a gaming PC and a PS4 Pro sitting on it. Gaming is still a major part of my life. I still play games online with people who I consider friends but have yet to meet in person. I chat about games with some of the people at work, and with the advent of smartphones, gamers are more connected community than ever before.
Will I still be playing games in twenty years time?
I think I will be.
So now the question is open to you Dear Reader, why do you play games?
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