Games.

A while back, I wrote about my history with games. Sort of. I was incredibly tired and ready for bed. But since then, I've actually organized my thoughts, and made things a little more coherent. So much so in fact, that I'm using this as a basis for some of my entrance exams. Games are an important part of who we are. More after the jump.



I’m a gamer. You name it, I’ve played it; video games, role-playing games, board games, I’ve played them all. I mention this because games are an important part of who I am. When I was a shy kid who had trouble making new friends, games brought me closer to my family. My dad and I bonded over our Nintendo. Our interests were so different: he liked golf, I liked skateboards (you can’t really combine the two, believe me) but we found common ground in video games. We played every kind of game we could find, and to our amazement, we liked the same kind of games. Nowadays we reminisce about the good ol’ days, reliving our shared triumphs, like finally getting past the lava troll in Shadowgate, and our defeats, like never actually beating the game.

At summer camp one year, I remember hearing some of the other kids talking about their Nintendo, and right away, I had a connection with them. We talked for a while, and I realized just how cool these guys were. Not only did they know about Super Mario Brothers Three, but they knew how to find the Warp Whistle which let you skip levels. I told them how to get the Tanooki Suit and change into statues that enemies couldn’t touch. We talked excitedly, and even though we’d never met before, it was like we’d played this game together. It was an instant bond. And, as it happens, they brought a game with them to camp. It was called Dungeons and Dragons and it changed my life. Here was a game that you didn’t need a console for, or even a TV. All you needed was your imagination and some dice I thought were pretty funny looking. I didn’t really understand the game at first, but I caught on. We would pretend to be these fantastic heroes, like knights or magic users, or elves, as this was back in the days when elf was a viable career path in life. And we fought monsters and saved towns together. And the shy kid who couldn’t make friends suddenly did. I never met them after that, it was my last year at that camp, but those two short months of gaming and camaraderie have affected me to this day.

When my parents divorced, it was hard on me and my sisters. It felt like our family was tearing itself apart, and nothing would ever be okay again. I was twelve and suddenly I was the ‘man of the house.’ Adolescence was rearing its pimply head, my voice was cracking, I suddenly understood why people liked rock, and secretly watched MTV when nobody was looking. Games helped me to deal with all of that. After all, compared to having to travel through time to stop an alien parasite from devouring the world, the rest of my problems seemed not so grim.

My sisters got into games then. They gave us common ground that we could connect over, just as I had with my friends at summer camp. My sister Sierra especially; she and I spent so many hours playing video games together. We started off with games like Mario Kart and Street Fighter Two, and found we loved playing against each other, so we soon moved to more action-packed games like Perfect Dark in which we could shoot rockets at each other. It was a healthy (for the most part) outlet for the competitiveness that sibling rivalry brings. It didn’t matter that she ratted me out for not cleaning my room, because I could just shoot her with rockets over and over. That was fun, for a while, but I learned a valuable lesson playing games with my sister; you don’t have to win all the time. I got to experience the whole ‘it’s not whether you win or lose’ lecture I’d heard a dozen times before first hand, and you know what? It’s true. There’s no fun in winning if nobody else will play with you, and so I worried less about beating my sisters and just had fun playing with them.

In high school, I found myself being drawn in to role-playing games again. My freshman year, I made fast friends with one of the seniors, Josh Bennett, who played this game called Magic the Gathering, He showed me how you play, but I wasn’t paying attention, I was thinking, ‘this is like Dungeons and Dragons, but with cards!’ I wasn’t entirely accurate there, but he taught me to play while I asked him about everything I could think of. It was like summer camp all over again. Here was someone whom I could talk with, and talk I did. I’d had all of the books for Dungeons and Dragons, but I never really had anyone to play it with before, and so I asked him all about it and I’m sure it annoyed him, but nevertheless, we became friends. After that, high school wasn’t as scary as I thought it’d be; I felt more confident, I could talk to people without feeling nervous inside, and felt like a door had opened. It was amazing.

Far from just influencing my social development, games also fueled my imagination and creativity. They opened up fantastic worlds populated with aliens and knights and everything in between for me. They showed me stories that couldn’t be told any other way, whether through immersing myself in the life of another character, or poring through tomes of background information, gleaning from their storied depths kernels of insight about the world of the game. Pen and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons combined the best of both worlds for me, providing my friends and I with the tools to tell stories of our own making both to and with each other. Lunchtime and any other break between classes became filled with stories of epic fights between heroes and monsters, our Beowulfs and Grendels battling across battered desks covered in graph paper to the clattering of a twenty-sided die.

Those stories are still with me today. Games are still with me today. I met my best friend in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. When my friends get together, we play games or we talk about them or we play one while talking about another. They are the core of our social experience. And it’s not just me and my friends, either. This is true of people across the globe. Games reach across the barriers of culture and generation. People of all ages know who Mario is, or that if it is very dark, you are likely to be eaten by a grue. It’s true today more so than ever, because games are such a large part of our collective culture. It used to be that games were once only available on specialized machines for playing games, but now they’re everywhere, on our phones, on our computers, even social networking sites have them.

Games bring us together. They provide us with challenges that people can tackle together. More and more games feature cooperative play modes, and gaming consoles like the Wii are giving games a much broader appeal, making them easily accessible to people who’ve never so much as picked up a controller. All of this, so that we can come together and play.