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My First Time

July 29th, 2008 · 5 Comments

There’s been tons of articles written ad-nauseum about how video-games do or do not impact people psychologically, most of them seemingly designed to reach a pre-determined point of view, backed up by extensive “research.”  I’m no scientist, so I’m only going to leave research in scare quotes and move on and leave the statistical debate on video-game violence et all and the impact it has on society to the guys with the pointy nerd hats (just kidding, I’m sure I’ll rant about it at some point in the future).

I’m more interested in the personal, anecdotal evidence.  I’m an entertainer, so I like to be entertained by personal stories.  Typically, when I write/create/design a new character, I try and come up with things in their history that make them tick.  Are they an asshole?  Why are they an asshole?  What made them an asshole?  What happened to them when they were younger that led to them being an asshole?  Can I write asshole five more times?

For instance, I’m a very competitive individual.  I like winning.  A lot.  It’s…hard wired in me.  I like my medals gold and my places to be first.  I’ve been known to be bitching up the biggest storm about latency and aim-botters on team-speak, only to check the score and see that I’m actually in first place on the server.  I get angry every time I’m killed in an FPS game, and I don’t understand how everyone else isn’t angry at themselves when they die.

So to bring this full circle, I figured I’d explain to you all how I came to be such a competitive jerk when it comes to games (and life in general).  The short version involves an irrational investment in twenty five cents by an eight year old.

The long version is slightly more interesting.

This story starts when I was three.  Or so I’ve been told.  I don’t have many memories from the time before I was five years old.  These two facts aren’t mutually exclusive; they both describe the same event: My parent’s divorce.  The memories I do have from before being five (while precious to me and I won’t bore you with them here), all share one thing in common:  they don’t involve my father.

It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to understand that the event probably left a large emotional burn on my psyche.  A young, confused child, a bedrock shaking emotional family trauma.  These things tend to leave emotional scars, which rear up in weird and sometimes tragically interesting ways.  I have no doubt that I’ve blocked out the entire event and the following years as a defensive mechanism against further pain.  Unfortunately, the event left its mark despite my selective memory.

Here’s where this takes a turn for the emo, but try and stay with me, I promise it’ll at least be interesting and gamer genesis related by the end.

I’ve come to realize that in the following years after my parents’ divorce, I wound up fearing rejection.  This, more than anything, became my biggest fear in life.  I have no doubt that my childhood recollection of the divorce, despite occasional and somewhat regular visitation with my father, left me fearing that other people in my life would leave me too.  Would my Grandparents leave me?  Would my friends leave me?  Would my Mother leave me?  These questions might seem irrational to you, but now that I have a daughter of my own, I can see how these become very valid and weighty concerns in the eyes of a child.

Fast forward five years, and an eight year old Spitfire is finishing up a long day of skiing lessons at a local ski resort.  I’m tired, slightly cranky, frostbitten, and I’d been apart from my Mom for the entire day.  Was I clingy?  It would be a safe assumption.  I was an only child with a single parent.  If it was a weekday and I wasn’t in school, I was in a day care, somewhere, even during the summertime.  My time on the weekend was a precious investment with my Mom, and while ski lessons were great (I think she liked to take me just so she’d have an excuse to ski herself), I probably would have rather spent the time at home where she was at least close enough to talk to.  But at least skiing was something we had in common.  I could show her what I’d learned, and she’d give me the praise I craved.

We were about to head home for the day, but I wanted her to see this cool new game called Lunar Lander I had seen in the arcade while I was taking a break from the bitter cold.  I had been watching the older kids play it for awhile, and felt that I could easily do as well as they did.  I asked if I could play it, and she (quite appropriately) told me that it probably wasn’t a good idea.  I don’t know if she could sense it or not, but Lunar Lander wasn’t exactly the easiest game in the world to play.  Newtonian physics in low gravity with a very low threshold for failure controlled by a few thrust buttons isn’t exactly a good “learning experience” to have with a video-game.

But I was insistent.  I nearly demanded that she give me a quarter so I could prove to her that I could play this simple game.  In the end, she relented, and gave me the twenty five cent piece that would go on to give me my first impression with a video-game, and start me down my personal gamer path.

I dropped the quarter in the slot, tentatively, hoping that this was the right thing to do with it (it’s what the older kids did with the money, but shit, did it matter which slot the coin went in?).  The screen prompted me to hit the 1P Start button, I found it, and found my little Lunar Lander perched on the launch pad.

I hit the thrust button, and began what can only be described as rapid epic fail.  All three landers, obliterated, in mere seconds.  I probably held the record for the shortest game of Lunar Lander, ever.

I was in a bit of shock.  Most everything came easily to me at that age.  Math, science, art, english, kickball, baseball, skiing.  Surely I should have perfromed better at this paltry simulation.  Obviously, my lack of ability here in this arcade reflects poorly on me as a child.  I’ve just wasted my mother’s hard earned money.  The money she works hard for when I’m in day care.  Not only have I wasted her money, I’ve wasted her time.  That time when she’s away from me.  This means that she’s going to have to spend more time away from me to make up for the money I’ve just wasted here ohgodshe’sgoingtoleaveme “I’LL NEVER WASTE YOUR MONEY AGAIN MOM.”

I’m a bit ashamed to admit this (despite my age at the time), but I started crying, right there on the spot, over losing twenty five cents to a video game.

Freud, no doubt, would have a field day with this were he alive to read it.

Of course, my mother was confused but maternally and lovingly concerned by my irrational outpouring of emotion over a video-game.  I’m sure she didn’t understand it then, and it’s only through a lot of reflection that I’ve come to understand why I felt the way I did at the time, and how it has shaped the way I play games now.

Freud would say that because of the divorce, and that first moment playing Lunar Lander, that I play video-games now to impress my mother.  While I think a lot of Freud’s rationale for his theories relied a bit too heavily in the sexual nature, I think he’d be right in this case (about the impressing part, not the sexing part you jerks).  I certainly don’t dwell on the fact when I’m gunning for first place on a server, but I swore then that I’d never waste my Mom’s money on a video-game again.  While I thought at the time that meant that I’d never play another video-game, it should be apparant that if you’re here that I was not impervious to the siren call of gaming.

I’ve since subconsciously turned that promise around, validating it not through avoidance of the medium, but by making sure that I’m good at video-games, thereby not wasting the money spent on them.  Yes, it’s my own money now (in fact, I’ve been mostly buying my own games aside from gifts received since I was thirteen, but that’s another chapter in this psychological thriller), but in a way, I guess, when I’m gunning for gold, I’m doing it for Mom’s acceptance and love, even if she doesn’t know it.  It’s kinda fucked up, sure, but is it any different than the kids who played football or swimming competitively in order to gain their parent’s love?  In a way, gaming for me is a way for me to connect emotionally and subconsciously with my Mom, especially since she doesn’t play video-games.

So that’s my story of how my first exposure to gaming molded me into the gamer I am today.  What’s your story?  Do you have one?  Leave it in the comments or link readers to it on your blog.  I’d love to hear about it.

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5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Gabe // Jul 30, 2008 at 4:58 am

    In third grade, I used to hang out with a bunch of local neighborhood kids. I was always a little bit of the odd man out, I think. Probably because I was a bit more mature than some of them, and mature boys and a young age seem to be ostracized a bit more than usual. To fast forward to the life changing event, one hot summer day, during a water fight, they thought it would be fun to try and drown me. Honestly, I don’t know what they were thinking, I just remember someone grabbing my arms and holding me while one of my best friends stuck a hose in my face and I couldn’t breathe. I managed to escape by kicking my captor in the balls and running home like a bat out of hell.

    From that day forward, I was terrified to go outside. If you can’t trust your best friend, who can you trust? So I started playing video games. A lot. Especially RPGs. They gave me this sense of freedom and control that real life couldn’t offer, especially when I knew the neighborhood gang still had a grudge against me (To this day, I have no idea what I did exactly to earn that kind of enmity). In my games, though, I could pretend I was someone important, with a special destiny and all that jazz. I even made up my own stories while playing the games. I especially remember a long running story in Super Mario RPG where I imagined events happening that never happened in game, that there was this huge war in the mushroom kingdom or something. It was like playing with action figures, creating an epic story out of a few small pieces with the power of the imagination.

    I think that’s one of my frustrations with some games today, too much is forced upon you. In some of the old final fantasys, for example, with their bad translations and all, I sort of wrote my own narrative as the game went on. Not satisfied with the dialog in the game, I gave the characters my own voices, thoughts, and emotions. Suddenly the game was a far more enriching experience, because I had a vested interest as a storyteller, not just as some guy moving pixels around on the screen. Don’t get me wrong, I still like my games to be well written, but sometimes I feel as if with our voice acting, our cinematics, our professional writers, our cameras, some of the magic that older games held upon has been lost in the process of telling stories, rather than letting the player get truly involved in them.

    Storytelling, the ability to create a world where I was in control. A world to explore issues I dealt with on a day to day basis, to try to find some meaning. As Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s how I got through some of those rough, lonely years. My life is certainly a lot better now, but telling stories is still an integral part of who I am.

    I do hope this made sense. I just had surgery and am a little doped up on narcotics. But this post really resonated with me, and I wanted to chime in.

  • 2 Digital Sextant :: Early Memories of Gaming // Jul 30, 2008 at 8:59 am

    [...] has an interesting anecdote about his own drive to play games (and more importantly, to succeed at them). He suggests his [...]

  • 3 Skye // Jul 30, 2008 at 11:56 am

    I grew up on a dairy farm in north central Wisconsin. It is safe to say that my family was poor. Video games were not something that my family had or could afford. I wasn’t exposed to it for a long time, in hindsight this was critical because I got into books and read a lot. Mainly history, sci-fi, and fantasy. (The first 100 page book I read was about Robert E. Lee) That love of reading would greatly influence my video game playing and the genres I would gravitate to.

    I remember quite clearly my first video game experience. I was 8 and at my cousin Justin’s house where we played Pitfall on the Atari 2600. That hooked me harder than 1985 DC crack. It was awesome. I went home and begged my parents for an Atari. They said no. That Christmas I played my cousin Mike’s ColecoVision. The game was Dragonfire. I still remember how frustrating getting across that drawbridge was for me, but I loved it. I wanted an Atari and ColecoVision so bad I could taste it, still my parents refused. This situation went on for a few years, I would go to a friend’s house and play video games or during the holidays my cousins would bring their consoles and I would fritter the hours away. Then I would go home and tell my parents how awesome and fun they were and that I deserved one. It never dawned on this young lad that in all actuality they couldn’t afford to buy one. The funny thing was while I truly enjoyed playing the games at the time, they never really stuck with me. The urge eventually would pass. This was the way it went until Christmas of 1987, that is when everything changed.

    It was simple enough, my cousin Danny brought his NES to my grandma’s house. He also introduced me to one of the few games that I have had a long lasting love for, even to this day. Legend of Zelda changed everything for me. At school I was deep into J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings. I loved Star Wars with a passion you only find in a young pre-teenage nerd. Dragons, princesses, magic, knights, and evil overlords all fired my imagination. Zelda captured all of that in wonderful 8-bit glory. I had never played a game like it, and very few games have ever grabbed hold of me that deeply and had such resonance.

    After that day I needed a Nintendo more than anything, that was a quest that had to be completed. Zelda had to be saved! It would be a long, long year, but finally, Christmas of 1988 rolled around and I had the best Christmas ever. Two of the best presents I have ever received were given to me that year, the first was a Marlin .22 bolt action rifle, the second, you guessed it, was a Nintendo with the powerpad pack in. It was one of the few times I didn’t know what to do first, should I go outside and shoot the gun, or should I fire up the Nintendo. I actually shot the gun first (I had wanted my own rifle just as badly as I wanted a Nintendo, but that is another story entirely) but then came in and played the afternoon away. I did save Zelda, the first of many times over the last two decades it would turn out. It soon became apparent that I was too far gone with the Nintendo and my parents had to regulate my usage. To say that I resented that was an understatement. Looking back at it I am glad they did, but at the time I felt that they were thwarting me just to be assholes.

    The gaming desire never left, after I graduated high school and joined the Marine Corps, one of the first things I bought after boot camp was a Super Nintendo and a month later I picked up a Sega Genesis. I didn’t have someone over me saying when I could play or that we couldn’t afford it. I had money to burn and video games were what I wanted, in particular RPGs. After all that reading I had done growing up, RPGs were a natural fit. Secret of Mana, Shining Force, Landstalker, these games were the ones that I gravitated to, and still do. As for systems, I tend to pick them all up, collect them actually. I have never traded in a game. I still have my entire library from 8 bit Nintendo on, plus the consoles to play them. I still actually break them out time to time when my brother is in town to have mad retro gaming days.

    Nowadays, I am not restricted by financial income and my wife is pretty understanding of my gaming hobby. I play on two current gen consoles and the PC, plus my DS. I have the ability to get the games I want when I want them. Still though, video games still capture my imagination just as much as books do. I get extremely excited for new games, especially ones I have been following for a long while. I will take off work to play new games. Most of all I don’t want to miss out on the experience like I had to when I was growing up.

    Thanks for an interesting topic. This was fun to write about.

  • 4 David // Jul 30, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    I can’t remember the first time I played a game - likely, it was at my neighbor’s house, where his technophile father brought home LOTS of bacon and video games - but I remember Christmas ‘94 or ‘95, when I received a Sega Genesis.

    This was the inevitable first step in immersing myself in interactive video entertainment. Every weekend was another eye-opening trip to the Video-O-Lympix to pick out that weekend’s game. Sunday meant the sad submissive return of the game to the store, and a bare week of homework before Friday dawned with fresh gaming enthusiasm and the cycle began anew.

    I will say that the ’90s seemed a halcyon age of gaming publications. Every month, the stands burned with fresh copies of GamePro, EGM and Expert Gamer rife with colorful pictures of new and exciting games (Ultra 64, anyone?) and editor columns suggesting a vast gamer community just a letter away.

    I cannot speak of any childhood trauma that drove me inside to the control and comfort of video games, but they always held a special unmeasured potential for adventure. I was a bookworm and a born nerd, so games weren’t so much a crutch as an escape, a natural avenue of exploration that an athlete finds in the spirit of physical exertion. I like to think that this spirit lives in both multiplayer shooters/fighters and single player adventures and shares equal time with group fun and personal introspection.

    It’s true that today’s graphics powerhouses seem lazy and lacking in originality. Sprite graphics always seemed more ethereal and fantastical, giving final fantasies another filter to the, well, fantastical. Today, everything’s gotta be gritty and hardcore. I miss the bright, magical games that Sega and Nintendo made to pave the streets of yesteryear. Perhaps the Wii is an evolutionary compromise.

  • 5 Amauriel // Jul 31, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    I can’t believe how similar some of these stories have been. For my own:

    I grew up with a father that liked buttons. He had a Pong game (pre-me, unfortunately) and a laserdisc over the years, along with anything else that came along. He and Mom also had a ColecoVision.

    I grew up playing ColecoVision with my cousins, some of my greatest memories of my childhood were in front of the big TV in the living room when the aunts would take their turns playing Ladybug (I had this one aunt that would scream bloody murder when a bug would get close to her, and memories of that scream always brings a smile to my face).

    I loved playing Coleco, but since the system was released a year before I was born, when I got into school I found that my new friends didn’t know about Jumpman Jr. or Venture…they knew about this guy named Mario. An NES must be mine!, I said, and asked for one for Christmas, moving it higher on my list each time I wrote to Santa.

    My dream came true when I was 8 (which would have been the Christmas of 1990, I believe). My grandmother was the purchaser of the system (powerpad and zapper deluxe set — go Grandma!) but Santa brought me some great games, including Tetris and Dr. Mario.

    We started to grow up…and unfortunately I grew wider almost as fast as I was growing taller. I was a chubby girl through most of school, and when you have a class with only 8 girls you quickly become the one picked on. Like those above me have mentioned, it was the childhood trauma of being picked on that drove me to my bedroom after school so many days, added to the rural lifestyle I lived. Who wants to spend all evening outside playing when you associate outside with the cattle chores?

    Anyway, my mom loves to tell it this way…
    She was 8, we bought her a Nintendo, and said she’d grow out of it.
    She was 10, we bought her a Super Nintendo, and said she’d grow out of it.
    She was 15, we bought her a Nintendo 64, and said she’d grow out of it.
    She was 20, bought herself a Gamecube before her Sophomore year of college…we knew she’d be playing games the rest of her life.

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