when i 'clicked" that da,mn A button baby !! !
When I was very young, my motor skills were terrible. As the story goes, playing video games actually helped me with that, my 1st game ever was Super Mario bros 1 (the one with duck hunt lol)
Ever since then, I have been in love with video games.
So, there are 4 main “Junctures” for my growth as a player and maker of video games for me. Each of these junctures cemented some large step I made in my stride towards becoming more of a serious game-thinker-writer-thingy:
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Emulated Pokémon Red on pc: Summer 2005. The first game I’ve played for any extensive amount of time. My older cousin, who was much more into games had it. Also introduced me to the concept of emulation
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Dungeons and Dragons 3.5th Ed: around 2008. I was the only kid younger than 10 at my local club. It felt exclusive and prestigious, and our GM was an absolute genius. Instead of going by the usual form we were fighting Mischievous dragons with foam darts contests and conversing with old gods that we met by the side of the metropolitan market because we wanted them to help us find runaway dogs for our neighbors. It also inspired me to GM for my own group of friends as well as join a LARP group, and both of those provided some of the most incredible and profound gaming memories of my life.
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Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos(and The Frozen Throne Expansion): Around 2010.The first game that made me think of video games as an assortment of systems and mechanics. Before warcraft 3,I experienced video games in an entirely superficial manner. Warcraft 3 was the first game I ‘mastered’, and that gained me a whole new way to enjoy and appreciate video games. It was also my introduction to online multi-player, as well as user-created-content. And to top it all off, it’s a fantastic game with a great story.
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Bioshock: 2012, a few months before Infinite came out. Out of all the games on this list I’d say Bioshock was the most significant to my mental development in relation to video games, and also had the most vivid ‘click’ moment for my interests in video games, as in me realizing ‘woah, video games can do THAT?’ In many ways, Bioshock was my Alien, in that it was just such a precise combination of all of its elements that you couldn’t appreciate just one, but has to try and see how they compound themselves to a whole. Bioshock was the first game that had me sit down and put all of my thoughts and ruminations on a piece of paper, and it was the game that inspired my first flash game creations in my programming class. I think more than anything, it was the first game that made me consider playing, making and discussing games as something that I want to be an active part of my life and media diet, rather than something I do on occasion.
Bioshock also cemented immersive sims as my favorite ‘type’ of games (genre? Sub genre?), because out of all of these games, Bioshock was the one that manages to ‘characterize’ its systems most effectively. For me, immersive sims combine an understanding of space with an understanding of function. The way a place and the systems within it are laid out reveals the desires, prejudices and morals of the people who constructed it. Bioshock, in my eyes, does that sort of storytelling better than any other video game I’ve played yet. I love it, and it really made an impression on me.
SO uhhhhh, sorry for the massive post. Hopefully this proved interesting to read. I should really just start putting my thoughts in a blog or something…
