I'm a gamer. The very first game I played was King's Quest IV on my dad's computer, unless you count the paint program that was on a computer so old the screen only came in green and black. Those were the days. My first console games were Super Mario Bros and Bart Vs The Space Mutants, which I played on my very own Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) which I got when I was five.
I've been racking my brains to think of how I ever heard of one, and I honestly have no idea. I don't remember seeing an ad, I don't remember reading about it in the paper, all I can remember is wanting one and getting one. Those were the days. Quite possibly it came from my father, he was always rather switched on technologically (I think he was on msn before I was) so it's possible he just decided that we as kids might like one. My dad's awesome that way.
The next 15 years were spent, after giving us the NES, of trying to take it away from us. That's not true in the slightest, but our parents, realising that we were spending an awful lot of time on it, wanted us to focus on other ventures as well. On the whole that didn't work out so well, but eventually we all grew up and reached the stage where we liked games, we wanted to play games, but we were also smart enough to focus on, you know, school and work and those sort of things.
I remember that my older brother Ben was by far the best player of the three. And Josh and I would frequently give our turns to him so we could finish a game that you normally couldn't finish in two. (We each were alotted two hours of play time a day, but were allowed to watch the others while they played) I'm not sure what Ben thought about this, but I certainly don't remember him complaining.
Now that I'm an adult gamer (by which I mean an adult that plays games, not that I play adult video games, which generally mean copious amounts of sex and violence with no justifiable point. For the record. in case anybody was wondering, anything with the words "Sexy" and "Poker" in the title does not count as a game), I finance and manage my own gaming habits. I do play a couple of hours a night in most cases, but I also ensure I'm in bed in time for work, and spend time on my other hobbies and side projects, so I argue it's had no detrimental effect whatsoever.
But I do have a large amount of games I haven't finished, and this has started to bother me. It's largely a side effect of my larger salary last year, where I had too much money for my own good, so most of it went on games and dvds. As a result, I frequently purchased games faster than I could finish them, would spend a little bit of time on all of them, and ultimately never see any of the endings. So I started ploughing through them one by one instead, and have actually increased the satisfaction I receive from them. Finishing a game feels great. It takes 10+ hours of your time, and you feel like you've achieved something once it's done, and it can go back on the shelf in the completed pile, which is getting ego swellingly larger.
In short, I am a gamer.
Those were the days.
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