Recently, gaming as a hobby has come out of the closet, so to speak. With the introduction of the Wii, I believe, and the uptake of “casual” gamers indoctrinated into the gaming subculture that occurred as a result of the Wii, there are more and more people who believe that gaming constitutes a legitimate pastime. Where once we had to hide in the shadows for fear of ridicule, we can now hold our heads proud and exclaim to the world, “I am a gamer!”
It’s very seldom, if at all, that a person wakes up one day and decides to fundamentally alter their social lives by becoming interested in gaming. Rather, it’s a gradual process that begins the day of their first exposure to video games. Whether this is from visiting a friend who has the latest game on their computer, seeing a console being demonstrated on television or real life, or simple exposure from members of the family, it’s the first bite that will determine the gamer’s attitude to games in their later life.
My first exposure to video games came in the form of my older brothers. Before computers were ubiquitous, and games were largely sneered at as a waste of time, we had something called a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Aside from the amazingly fast 3.5 Megahertz processor, it had a whole 16 kilobytes of memory, and ran all games from tapes. It seems downright primitive right now, and I’m sure my cellphone has at least a hundred times more processing power and memory, but wow, back in the day it was so amazing to be able to move a character on the screen and have him shoot stuff, just by pushing a few buttons.
Being too small, and unable to actually read, I relied entirely on my brothers to load games and get them ready to play, and even then I had a hard time remembering the controls. Keep in mind that this was before game pads were standard issue, and there was a whole QWERTY keyboard full of keys. My brother’s advice still rings in my head from time to time: “You can rest your fingers on these keys, but don’t push them.”
Fast forward a few years, to the purchase of a rebranded Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and I was hooked. I remember waking up crazy early on a Saturday morning to get some quality gaming in, playing games I couldn’t understand (they were all in Taiwanese, according to an Asian friend) over and over. From ridiculously hard games like Battle Toads and the Rock Man series, to experimenting with the Game Genie to find the ultimate cheat code; such were the memories of my childhood.
From my first experience, up until a few years ago, gaming was almost like a scarlet letter, dooming you to a life of name-calling and social embarrassment. All the so-called “cool kids” would point fingers and mock anybody outspoken in their video game playing. Nowadays … well they are more likely to turn around and challenge you to a game of Halo.
It’s truly a wonderful world we live in, when the outcasts can be accepted into the mainstream in the space of a few short years. And who knows, once we can shake off the stigma created by psychos who go on killing sprees after playing Grand Theft Auto, maybe the terms “casual” and “hardcore” will one day be a thing of the past too.
Michael joins MyGaming’s team of contributors fresh out of varsity where he studied Journalism. Michael has previosuly written for California based gaming site Nomoregameblogs.
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