Electric Challenge 2020: Stage 2
For those who might want to join this challenge, stage 1 was a friending meme.
Stage 2: A Gamer is You
As much as we like to say we've been playing video games all our lives, each of us had to start somewhere and go from there. Today, in your own space, talk about your history as a gamer. Where did it all begin? When did it all begin? Which games had the biggest impact on you? And so on.
Well, I definitely have not been playing video games all my life, because I didn't have access to any until my early teens. (I did enjoy board games, card games and making up elaborate fantasy stories involving quests that I played out though - so I guess those were a precursor to my later interest in gaming.)
My first experience of gaming as such came when I was around 10 and we got a computer in the classroom at school. While it was mainly used for schoolwork, there was one game on it we were allowed to play on breaks - a text based adventure game called Stugan. I remember being so fascinated by it! The same year one of my friends got a NES and we spent many, many hours playing Super Mario Bros. I have fond memories of lugging the console around between our houses because that same friend got a new sibling that year and her mother apparently thought letting her bring the console over to someone else's house was a small price to pay for not having us in their house all the time. :P
It was a few years later before we got a home computer and I had actual computer games at home. My first few were ones that came on a disk from some magazine or other, the only one I remember was Lemmings which I was obsessed with. At some stage we got a few disks with various DOS games, the only two I remember is Keen 4 (which is a game I still pull out now and then) and Winter Challenge (the slalom and bobsledding was just super addictive?!). We also got Rayman at one point, which was another early favourite.
In 2000 I got The Sims as a gift and that was a game I would love for a long time (I still play Sims now and then, and I have played all the iterations and expansions). This was the first time I was so into a game that I actually stayed up half the night to play it (much to my mother's chagrin). I gotta be nostalgic for Makin Magic! Still one of the best expansions for the games. I spent so much time in that game building houses and raising generations of sims at at one point (during Sims 2) I made my own clothing and objects. It was pretty much the only game I played until...
Me and my sister got a Playstation 2 for Christmas in 2003. \o/ By then I had wanted a console for a long time and I can still remember the absolute happiness of finally having one. (And the frustration of having to share it with my sister lol.) We got a few games with it, one of which was Final Fantasy X-2. This was my first time playing a RPG and definitely solidified my love for gaming. I played through it so many times (and still have trauma from that fricking lightning tower calibration). I was obsessed with it on a level where I would pretend to bee asleep until my parents slept so I could get back up and play in secret. I bought Final Fantasy X as well for my very first paycheck and unsurprisingly loved that one as well.
After that I have continued to mainly play RPGs, because I now knew that I loved to immerse myself in story-driven games. A boyfriend introduced me to World of Warcraft and that was my main gaming obsession for many years. I joined right before TBC released so I never raided in Classic, but I raided a lot (first as an affliction warlock and later as a resto druid - I very much love being in a support role) in TBC and for the later half of it I was GM for a raiding guild. I hiatused for a while at the start of WotLK because I moved between countries, and then I had a brief stint in a small and amazingly friendly raiding guild but when that guild disbanded I never quite got back into it. I jumped between guilds for a while, raiding a bit here and there through the start of Cataclysm, but I soon found that my enjoyment of dungeons and endgame content was largely based on being in a guild I really felt comfortable in and I never quite found a guild like that again, so even though I have kept coming back every new expansion I have just pottered about doing what I can solo and then inevitably left again. I just don't like PUGs.
Funnily enough it's only recently that I have started actively looking for new games, before that I have mostly been introduced to them by friends or random circumstances. My love for Diablo came really randomly because I was without internet for a month and just bought a random game, and Dragon Age I found when I bought Origins and Awakening (unopened!) for about a dollar each in a thrift store a few years after their release. But Steam has definitely made it easier to find new games and I'm a bit more adventurous now, although the bulk of me trying new games is still through recs - unless there's a new game in a franchise I already know I love, of course.
Honestly though this question also made me reflect on how I don't really see myself as a gamer - I love games, and have done for as long as I've had access to them, but to my mind a gamer is someone who is more serious about gaming than me. But then I think back on the games I've played, and how much time I spend playing them, and how much I love them, and the fact that I own several pieces of game merch, and I guess I kind of have to reconsider...