For a good chunk of my life, I’ve been fascinated by video games. I remember playing games on my dad’s computer when I was little – I can’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. I played games while listening to the dot matrix printer underneath the computer, and then was taught how to make slinkies out of the edges of the paper so I would still be entertained when my dad needed the computer again. They were “educational” games, I’m sure, though I can’t remember which games I played back then.
“Educational” was the major theme of the games I was allowed to play as a kid. Some of these games I remember very fondly – we had several of the Super Solvers games, including Treasure Mountain and Challenge of the Ancient Empires, which my brother and I played over and over. I also played quite a lot of Oregon Trail (I particularly remember playing it both at school and at home in 3rd grade), and Sim City 2000, which remains one of my favorite games to this day. My dad may still have the 3.5 inch floppies which contained many of these games floating around somewhere.
One game that proved pivotal in my childhood was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Not because it was a particularly exciting game – it wasn’t. But when I was in 3rd grade, my dad had promised both my brother and I that if we were able to reliably type 30 words per minute, we would each get our own computer which we could keep in our respectives rooms. I took that offer quite seriously – I really wanted my own computer – and sunk many hours into Mavis Beacon. Being older than my brother by a couple years, I was the first one to reach the goal, and had my very own computer in my room by the end of 3rd grade.
I remember that computer fondly. It was a hand-me-down from my dad’s work, and ran Windows 2.1. I wasn’t allowed to install much on it, only the pre-approved games like Sim City and Treasure Mountain. I probably spent more time playing the default Windows games that have come with Windows for decades – Solitaire, Minesweeper, Freecell and Hearts. I got to be particularly good at Freecell, to the point where it was rare that I wouldn’t be able to solve any board put in front of me.
PC games were pretty much all I had at home when I was growing up. My parents refused to buy us any consoles, even though our cousins and friends all seemed to have either a Nintendo or Sega system. When we visited family in Denver, my brother and I would spend as much time as we could playing games on one cousin’s Super Nintendo or another cousin’s Sega Genesis. I would watch more than play, but I had a particularly fondness for playing Columns on the Genesis. During the summer, we would head down the street to our neighbors, who had two kids of the same age as us, and who also had a Super Nintendo. I remember spending many afternoons trying – and failing – to beat Disney’s Aladdin, and being terrible at Street Fighter II.
The first handheld game system I remember being exposed to was the original Game Boy, which an older cousin had brought on a visit when we still lived in Denver. I remember that he had a Bugs Bunny game of some sort. I was obsessed with Bugs Bunny at the time, and wanted to play. I may or may not have monopolized that Game Boy the entire time my cousin was in town – I don’t recall. But I daydreamed for years after about having a Game Boy of my own.
This only intensified in 5th grade, when I met the girl who would remain my best friend through high school. She and her sister shared a Game Boy, as well as my favorite game at the time – Tetris. Sometimes I felt like going over to her house to hang out or spend the night was just an excuse for me to spend hours playing Tetris. I suspect she was annoyed with me more often than not in those days.
At one point, my brother and I hatched a plan to pool all of our Christmas money in order to buy a Game Boy and hide it from our parents. It was somewhere around $90 back then to get a Game Boy and a game, though I don’t think we ever agreed on which game we wanted to get with it. I had to have been the mastermind behind this scheme, because my brother decided at some point that he’d rather spend his hard-earned Christmas money on something more immediately gratifying.
Instead, I took what money I had and secretly bought a handheld Batman game – one of those horrible Tiger games that were difficult to make any sense out of. I never made it very far in that game, but I hid it away in my room and spent too much time on it anyway. The lure of being able to illicitly play a video game overrode any other considerations. When I was in elementary school and middle school, any game was a good game.
By the time I was in late middle school, my brother and I had begun more seriously petitioning our parents to let us get new games. My dad was generally on board, though consoles were still out of the question, as were any games that involved guns or other obvious forms of violence. Caesar 3 is a game my dad picked up that was a particularly big hit with my brother and I – and my dad as well. He put as many hours into that game as my brother or I did. We all remember it fondly, too. My brother had some success in convincing my parents to let him get games that his friends were playing, like Baldur’s Gate. I also was allowed to keep a copy of Dune 2000 which had been gifted to me by a friend.
My brother and I rarely had time limits on the games we played as kids. Since we often shared the same computer, we did have to swap places every so often. Caesar 3, for example, was only installed on the family computer, despite the fact that my brother and I both had our own computers by that time. More than anything else, my parents policed for content. I was in 8th grade by the time we were first allowed on the internet (it had only been around for a couple years by that point anyway), and we had strict limits on how much time we were allowed to spend online each day. My parents had complicated the matter by subscribing to dial-up without adding a second phone line, so sometimes our allotted time was cut short when my mom needed to use the phone. I didn’t even try to play games online until college because of those restrictions.
The world of video games only really started to open up to me towards the end of high school, when my brother managed to get an emulator plus a number of NES and SNES emulations from a friend of his. We both installed the emulators somewhat illicitly – my parents caught on at some point, I know, but by that point, we were both old enough and had enough control over our own computers that they couldn’t stop us. I spent many, many hours catching up on Super Mario 3, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, and X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse (I was really into the X-Men at the time), among others. Even though we were playing those games using mice and keyboards, we were both still able to grab pieces of the past that we felt we’d missed out on.
Looking Back
To this day, I’m still nostalgic for games in the SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64 eras. We never owned any of those systems, but through my cousins and friends, I was able to watch and even sometimes play a number of games on them. Back then, I was often resentful of my parents for not allowing us to spend our childhoods like our friends did, lost in the worlds that video games created. But I understand now why my parents made the decisions they did. Though our computer time was not limited (once we got our own computers, anyway), what we could do on them was. As a result, I probably spent a lot more time reading, writing, drawing, building with Legos, and playing outside than I would have otherwise.
I also truly think I appreciate games more now as a result of desiring them – and not being able to have them – as a kid. For lack of my own video games to play, I spent a lot of time at other people’s houses, watching as those other people played games. I still enjoy watching other people play games, and often find it more fun and less frustrating than playing those same games myself.
On the other side of that coin, I’m often more reluctant to jump into new games, for fear that I won’t be good that them because I didn’t put in all those hours of practice as a kid that my peers did. Before I bought my first system for myself – a refurbished Nintendo DS – I agonized over whether I would have too much trouble playing the games for it to be worth it. My fear was, of course, unfounded – Nintendo excels at making games with a very low barrier to entry. But still, I often keep myself from playing some games because I assume I am just bad at some types of games, and that they will only frustrate me as a result.
Which I am. My hand-eye coordination leaves much to be desired, in part because I’m not willing to put in the time needed to perfect my timing and precision. A part of me wonders how much of this comes from absorbing the tired trope that women aren’t as good at games as men. I know that’s not true, but I also know how powerful the social constructs behind those tropes really are.
Another part of it may be because… well, I’m an adult now. I know that my time has limits, and that I have other obligations. I also know what makes me frustrated, and am more apt to want to avoid becoming frustrated. I’m also conscious of how playing games can affect my mood, and how my mood can, in turn, affect how I feel about a game as I’m playing it. I have an amount of self-control and self-awareness with regard to how and why I play games which I certainly didn’t have when I was a kid.
Do I have an appreciation for games now that I may not have had, were my parents more lenient around the issues of video games when I was a kid? I honestly don’t know. I feel nostalgia for the games I encountered as a kid, but that nostalgia is based on small snatches of memories, tinged with jealousy and desire, which I was only able to start to satisfy as an adult. I felt like an outsider in the world of games then. In many ways, I feel like an outsider now – my relationship with games is still often one of looking at them from afar, rather than experiencing them firsthand.
Maybe, had I grown up with the ability to play any game, any time I wanted, I wouldn’t be so interested in them intellectually now. Perhaps having it all wouldn’t have driven me to seek out games as an adult to the extent that I have over the past 15 years. Or maybe I would’ve become much more a part of the gaming community, rather than feeling as though I can only exist on the fringes.