Perhaps they are actually Daddy Long Legs. I don't care, they are creepy.

Yet I digress, this is not a post about spiders, or any type of arachnid for that matter, its about video games. As I sit in my "mancave", a.k.a. my basement, For my first serious post I decided to tackle a big question. Why do I play video games? On the surface I can answer it fairly easily. First and foremost, video games are fun. There is a special type of joy that is derived from bringing home a new sealed game, especially one that has been highly anticipated, stripping the plastic off, cracking opening the case, and popping the disc in my console. This is a feeling that can be traced a long way back into my childhood.

My first experience with video games was with an Atari 2600. The memory, of course, is a little hazy because I was pretty young considering I was born almost ten years after the initial launch of the console in 1977. I do remember being fascinated with Missile Command and Asteroids. I couldn't have been older than four years old at this time, but something about playing these games always stuck with me. This was the start of a long love affair with video games.

Soon after that, Nintendo dug their claws deep into my childhood, and Sega, with the help of the Genesis, helped to continually fuel what would become my favorite past time. Thinking back to these early experiences, I remember not only enjoying the time spent with the controller in my own hands, but also witnessing other people have their time with the games. (Which most likely explains why I spend potentially to much time watching Quick Looks.) The time spent in one of my childhood friend's basement are the perhaps some of the fondest, there were a lot spiders in that basement, too. We became friends through little league baseball but truly bonded over the hundred of hours spent devouring any and all Super Nintendo tapes we could get our hands on.

That leads to the second reason that I love playing video games. Video games, more so than other media formats, create a fantastic opportunity for players to create experiences and share them with others. Multiplayer has become such an integral part of the current generation, but it was the system link capabilities of the original Xbox, four TVs, four copies of Halo:Combat Evolved, and 15 friends, that truly made this apparent to me. And that was just the beginning. What really fascinates me is the stories me and my coworkers would tell each other when we all got out copies of Fallout 3. Eventually that led to even more discussion and story swapping when Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hit our respective consoles. That's not to mention the comparison we would make about whose Sheppard was more bad ass in our individual universes in the Mass Effect franchise. I could go on and on about these experiences but that would take up a lot of my time and yours.

There are many reasons why I still find myself passionate about video games, but the sense of community and having fun are always going to be at the top of the list. Thanks for reading and hope you enjoyed this. Feel free to leave comments and feedback, any and all our appreciated as I am trying to figure out what I am going to do with this blog. Thanks again.

While I have been following and lurking around Giant Bomb for the last few years, I have come to realize I have never really contributed anything to the community that has given so much to me. Well hopefully I change that with what I hope will be my first in a long line of blog posts. I have never blogged before and have never been much for jumping in to an online conversation before, except when I was around 13 years old and Yahoo! chat rooms were all the rage (A/S/L anyone?). I am not sure what I am going to write about, but the wealth of content on the site has always inspired me to start something, anything.Plus the support I witness from this community makes it seem like a relatively safe place to start. Let's hope I can actually manage to write something worth reading. Now it's time to sit back and think up something to write.