Ok, let me be straight up from the off: this is about my reasons for gaming, what I like and don’t, and is generally more about me than anything else. I will ask the question of you at the end, but please, if your going to comment on my thoughts, at least be polite.

Now, for most of my life I have been a geek. Its an honest assessment, and one anyone who knows me, or indeed, has read my previous posts can attest to. I am cool with it, but this is probably the biggest reason why I game.

As a geek, I have a certain affinity for some material. For some geeks it is swords and sorcery, hack and slash, with the height of your geekdom coming from knowing every line from the Conan movies. For others, and for me, it is science fiction and to a lesser extent, comic books.

As a kid I grew up watching Transformers and G.I. Joe (action force as it was known in the ) along with M.A.S.K and Centurions. These cartoons really grabbed me, they were surprisingly adult in how they told their stories, despite being ‘kiddified’ and were brilliantly inspired pieces of sci fi. This followed on into the movies I watched, with the obvious one’s being Star Wars, because, lets face it, very few sci fi geeks don’t love them.

Gaming original started out as a way to a) shut me up and b) do something else but use my imagination to re-enact great Autobot vs Decepticon battles with my Transformers toys. However, as the technology of gaming became better and better, and more cinematic and intricate story’s could be told, I found my self drawn to it more and more.

I started playing space invaders when I was very young on a really, really old battery powered device with a black and white screen built in. Later I graduated to the ZX spectrum and games like Chucky Egg (I think that was it) and Ghostbusters. Then came the PC into our house and asteroids took over for a while.

Shortly there after, stories were added to games. Oh wow, now here was something that filled my head with information, and let what I do best run amuck. Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, the very first Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, all games with stories that I got behind, along with the Seminal Doom.

My imagination was on over load, and it pretty much still is. Gaming, along with movies and to a lesser extend TV, has become my medium of choice to tell intriguing stories with great characters and fantastic backgrounds. I first geeked out over the story in Wing Commander, then moved on to both flavours of Command and Conquer (the installs for those early games were like p*rn for me!!!) before getting to PS2 games like Devil May Cry.

It was this era that really made me game a lot more. The story’s and cinematic flair available through the power of the PS2 and its successors (Xbox included) meant that developers came up with stories and universes that appealed to me on a fundamental level.

The biggest game to do that is, and despite the attention I know this will get, Halo. Bungie created one of the greatest science fiction universes ever, its intricate back story, powerful characters and awesome visual scope made it probably my favourite game series of all time. I just can’t help myself, it is brilliant.

And now, that is why I game. For the story, the characters and universes developers create. The power of modern computing technology allows for those cinematic cut scenes and powerful story’s, and titles like Braid have certainly shown that a story doesn’t just have to be about blowing stuff up. Gaming has become more than just a pass time of the bored (though it is still that), it is now a full fledging medium in its own right, with its own rules and boundaries.

These rules and boundaries can be bent or broken, but even if developers remain within them, they can create stories are compelling as the greatest works of literature or cinema and tell them in a completely different way. Do we need a movie based on Halo or Gears of War? Honestly, probably not, though I would go see them.

Games can tell stories just as well as any other medium, they captured by heart and mind years ago continue to do so. I may be a geek, and gaming geek at that, but I have been rewarded for my status with stories I will probably never told better in another medium, and experiences that will stick with me for the rest of my life. Gaming is great, though it may not be your reason to game, the stories and universes that I play through are mine.

So tell me, what are yours?