Video Games: A memoir

After the lecture yesterday I was thinking about my experiences with video games. I decided to write a memoir about it. When I was five my grandparents gave me a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) with Super Mario Bros. 3! I was extremely excited,they had one at there house that we could go and play duck hunt and Super Mario Bros. on, as well as excitabike, they also had Skate-r-die but I couldn't ever figure that game out. About this same time I was learning how to utilize a computer. My dad taught me how to use a 5.25 floppy drive and some minor DOS (Disk Operating System) commands. We only had Golf and starfall. I spent hours designing the most ridiculous golf courses you've ever seen. I didn't have patience to play the game though.

My parents didn't ever want to buy us video games, they were too expensive, but we inherited some cool computer games from my super computer savvy uncle. I remember being unable to sleep at around nine years-old because I was so excited to play SimAnt, so excited that I jumped out of bed and headed to the computer where I installed the game and played until about 5am. This would be the first of my late night digital game playing. Super Nintendo (SNES) came out sometime in this same time period. I told my parents that if Santa brought me a super nintendo that I would never need another game system ever in my life. On christmas morning there was no Super Nintendo but after breakfast there as I was heading downstairs to play with some K'nex I saw a big box on the bottom step. It was a Super Nintendo! We played Donkey Kong country in all of it's 16-bit glory the entire day!
I was already in love with video and computer games when I turned thirteen but my friends and I still spent plenty of time jumping on the trampoline, playing basketball and swimming in ditches. When my family moved my new friends were hardcore gamers. I was introduced to Warcraft 2, Starcraft and Mechwarrior. These were the first violent games to grace my home. My parents weren't especially pleased but I played them all the same. One of the greatest days was when we bought a 56K modem, wowie! What a blazing speed! It took a lot of time and effort but eventually I got hooked up onto Battle.net for some serious multiplayer action. Right as we got it hooked up Jedi Knight 2 came out and STAR WARS was just starting to get big again (The Phantom Menace) .

Then we moved again, my new friends weren't into gaming. In fact they were all seniors and I was a freshman, they were much more interested in cars and women. So I had to adapt making sure to keep up some gaming on the side. One new thing I learned in this era was that you could auto-run sports games through entire seasons and bet on who would be the winner, it was a great way to gamble! Ok, I never actually did this but it sounded pretty sweet at the time.
Once all my friends graduated, the residue of the group took up some old school gaming. With our small teenage fortunes we went about buying as many NES and SNES games as we could get our hands on. Life was good and we were playing a lot of Mortal Kombat and as an added bonus I was the good at it! So good that no one wanted to play anymore. We soon started playing a lot more Playstation 2, Tekken 3 was the game of choice. I was pretty good at it until my friend, Ben, started practicing. We hung out a lot my junior year and played a lot of "vids" as we came to call them.

My senior year I became a lot more interested in my high school activities, student council, dances, choir, drama etc. I didn't have much time for video games but occasionally would play with friends when we were hanging out. The big game around this time was Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Grand Theft Auto 2 (GTA2). This was the first time I realized that video games could have an effect on a person. Leaving a friend's house one day after playing GTA I had this insatiable desire to run over a mailbox. I didn't do it but I wanted to do it so bad and felt like it wouldn't be a bad thing to the point that I realized the game was affecting me a lot! This turned me off from GTA but not video games as a whole.

Now for the climax, I was now a freshman in college and living life to the fullest. I chose to live at home and attend the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Warcraft 3 came out at this time and I spent many late nights trying to beat the game, which I never did. My first semester I dated, met a girl and we started dating. But after the first semester I reconnected with my friend Ben and we started playing vids again. I decided that video games and hanging out with the guys was a lot better than a girlfriend. Plus, I was a premie anyway so big deal! We began to live for Thursday and Friday nights. I didn't have class on Friday so we would play until 5 or 6am. Mostly Halo, but the occasional Tekken or Parapa the Rapa (we reserved that for when we were really tired and had fully imbibed ourselves with Mountain Dew, the real gamers drink). The most ironic thing that happened during this time was that Ben my old gamer friend admitted that he didn't really care for video games but that they bred sociality so he bought them for that reason. We enlisted another guy during this time, he actually introduced us to Halo, we called him Obi. We also became really interested in Razor scooters, specifically customizing the decks (that isn't relevant but it makes me laugh).

During my mission, my friend Ben moved to Utah to ski. Obi moved back and forth between Utah and Missouri and ended up back in Montana with his family. When I returned home I tried to get back together for some vids but it wasn't the same in fact, Ben was engaged...lame. The good news was that I still had Warcraft III and my family had purchased decent internet and put a Local area network in. So my brother and I enjoyed some fearsome battles together. In fact I once told my then girlfriend, now wife that I was tired so she would go home and I could play Warcraft with my brother. She wasn't too happy when she found out the truth. Guitar Hero was now on the rise as well and I became very interested in it along with Dance Dance Revolution. I realized that these games, which promoted socializing, were a lot more fun than the solitary games. Eventually I got engaged and moved to Utah to go to school. My fiance was not the slightest bit interested in vids much to my chagrin. I poked and prodded but she wouldn't budge, she really hated video games. So it was something I sacrificed, needless to say I was really surprised when she bought me a Playstation 2! It functions as a DVD player more than anything else now, except for a guitar hero stint when I got to the end guy and then my brother and his friend came into town and stayed at our place, it hasn't work correctly since, and yes I'm still bitter about it.

When I was a freshman playing games at Ben's his brother-in-laws would come hang out with us, drink dew, and play vids all night. I dreamed of a day when I would do that with my own brother-in-laws or at least my own brothers. I'm still waiting. My brother-in-laws aren't too interested and my brothers didn't catch the video game bug that I did. They'd rather go to sleep than stay up half the night playing vids. For whatever reason, I have no idea, video games really bring people together. I say people but I mean men. Yeah, for the most part they are a real waste of time but when I think back about nostalgic periods of life I think back to that magical freshman year when we played and played and played until we crashed. Life was good, in a different way than today. So ladies, when your husband needs time to go play some ridiculously violent video game (I say violent in jest) with his buddies let him. You probably don't understand it but he doesn't understand the things that you do with your friends either so just let him. In a strange way, I think he'll be a better man for it.

*Disclaimer: I am in no way saying that your husband, boyfriend, brother or otherwise should engross himself in a digital world of asocial activity in which he throws his life away. I'm only saying that once in a while it's kinda nice.*