Gaming

[serenissima]

A little while ago, my brother sent me a link to this essay: "OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intarweb!!!!1" I finally read it last night. It's part of an entire issue on women in gaming that came out last October, from an online gaming magazine. The author describes the disbelief and lack of acceptance she encounters from her fellow gamers and even from her guildmates. She writes, "My adventures on the internet have led me to learn many things about myself. I'm not a girl and I do not exist on the internet. I do not play games and do not know how to turn on my computer."

My initial reaction was amusement, but also doubt and surprise, because I haven't run into this remarkable delusion myself. Then again, I'm not really a gamer as such.

I definitely love the Internet. I've had the experience of spending lots of time on a [particular] newsgroup and later on a [particular] muck, and I've dropped in on the associated IRC channel a few times. I once built my own website by hand, back when frames and Javascript were fairly new, and I'm comfortable using FTP from a command line. I no longer spend much time with realtime 'net communication, but I do have instant messenger accounts with three services. And, of course, witness the venue in which I'm writing at this moment. My experience has been that females have always been fairly well represented. But my experience has been, in practical terms, a subsection of the 'net dragon community. The self-selection that isolates dragons is different than the self-selection that isolates gamers. (Or to put it another way, the author of the essay has been playing with a bunch of dumb kids.)

My family never really had a game console. We brought home a Nintendo, already ancient when we acquired it, from trip to visit relatives overseas one summer. We had a cartridge that had 30 different games on it, but the instructions were all in Japanese, so we couldn't figure out how to play a few of them. I fondly remember "Arkanoid," "Adventure Island" (actually No. II of that series), "Balloon Fight," "Mappy," "Tank Wars," and of course "Tetris." My brother and I played the Nintendo at my relatives' house and later at home for a few happy weeks. Then the school year started, and my father disconnected the system and put it away. We never got it to work again.

So my video game experience -- by "video game" I mean everything played on a screen, including computer, console and arcade games -- really began with the family computer. We had "Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?" which I already knew from school. We had "Battle Chess," where the pieces killed each other with swords. We had "The Summoning," where you cast spells with a sign language alphabet. We had "Crystal Caves" and "Secret Agent: The Hunt for Red Rock Rover," featuring a gray-faced hero. We had "Super Solvers: Outnumbered!" and "Super Solvers: Challenge of the Ancient Empires," which taught me, perhaps unintentionally, the first several bars of various classical music pieces. We had "Lands of Lore: Throne of Chaos," with the prettiest graphics I had yet seen.

I really liked all those games. Well, not so much the Carmen Sandiego and the Battle Chess... somehow chess never held my interest. But I loved "Lands of Lore." I liked "The Summoning" all right until I got stuck; I found it to be a rather difficult game. We also had a combination demo of three games, including "CD-Man" (a Pac-Man knockoff) and the first three levels of "Spear of Destiny;" I forget what the third game was. I liked "CD-Man," but "Spear of Destiny" held absolutely no appeal for me. Neither did "Duke Nukem," which I vaguely remember. Maybe my brother had it. There was one shooter-type game, rather mindless, that I remember liking, namely "Raptor: Call of the Shadows," in which your airplane shoots the alien airplanes from a strictly top-down view. But for the most part, RPGs = fun, shooters = not fun.

This conclusion holds up with the evidence of later games. I liked "Lords of the Realm II" a lot, but I autocalculated all my battles; I wasn't so interested in being my own general. I kinda liked "Warcraft II," though I didn't get into it as much as my brother. I did not at all like "Doom" or "Quake." "Diablo" was interesting for maybe a couple of weeks; it got old fairly quickly. "Mech Warrior" held my interest even more briefly. In fact, I can't remember being enthralled with any computer game in high school, except maybe "Lords of the Realm." I think I mostly dabbled in the games my brother got. Even once I got to college and had a computer of my very own, I don't remember buying a game for myself. Maybe one or two. I do remember playing Minesweeper and Tetris more than a little.


I'm rambling. My point is, I'm not big on most video games. I like puzzles. I don't like gore. I like lots of plot. I like options. I like a learning curve that starts shallow but stays challenging. But more than all that, I don't like losing the better part my nights and weekends to a video game, and that's what happens when I find one I really like. When I pick up a good novel, I tend to read straight through without stopping for dinner -- sometimes, without stopping to sleep. When I pick up a good video game, I get similarly preoccupied. So I have to be careful.

Comments

[aristeros.livejournal.com]

I could not fit all of the games I've played in one entry of reasonable length, even if I could remember them all.

Oh, and you're going to lose nights and weekends to anything sufficiently compelling without discipline.