Life of a Gamer

[ngotham93nd]

I'm currently doing an essay about video games. I was hoping for some data in the form of insight from gamers around the world. Can you please give me info on why you love video gaming and what type of video games you enjoy? Also maybe how long you’ve played video games and your experience with gaming? Thanks

[danzibr]

Man, I'd love to write an essay on this. Uhh, I mean, tell you my life gaming story.

I am now 28, have a wife and 2 kids. I started playing games when I was 3 or so, on the NES. I for sure played games before I could read. My brothers and I would play together. Over the years we got a Sega Genesis, SNES, Sega 32X, 3DO, PlayStation, GameCube, Wii, PS3, Wii U... well, the last 2 I got on my own. Also gamed on PC.

I suppose I got into gaming because my older brothers played games. I think my parents had an Atari 2600 at some point, but I never saw it. I like almost every genre except sports games, though I'm particularly fond of RPG's and horror games.

I believe I spent too much time on gaming when I was younger, but then again it developed certain parts of my mind, I'm sure. And I enjoyed it. And I got good grades and whatnot, so I don't regret it. In recent years (i.e., since having children) my gaming time went way down. Now I play games with my son (who is 4). I also gamed with my wife a bit, but I was more into it than she ("more into it than her" would have totally different meaning).

Anything else, lmk!

[Otomodachi]

32 years old, playing since the NES came out. Also had a Balley... something. Balley Entertainment System? That was a hand-me-down from my dad, as well as an Apple IIE for games like Combat, Pac-Man and other Atari ports.

Up until I was 25-26 years old, I liked every kind of game. FPS, RTS, TBS, 4X, MMO, cRPG, jRPG, flight sims... city sims... just everything. I think I liked video games so much because they were straightforward in a way real life usually isn't; it was a lot easier to figure out exactly what input would yield exactly what result and next thing you know you're sniping the enemy base from your roof with a pistol on Sidewinder in Halo.

I was also pretty evenly split between solo and social gaming; even before the consoles got fancy (remember the playstation adapter that let you have four controllers? Remember when x-box came out?). I remember playing games like Monkey Island and Civilization with friends on the PC, or taking turns playing Mario or Sonic... so it was also a social event for me, it was helpful because I love my social time but I need to have SOMETHING to do with my hands, at the same time.

As graphics started to improve, too, and I got older, I started indulging in a certain habit that is either legal, illegal, or medicinal depending on where you live. Video games were just something that seemed to naturally fit with that kind of thing; sink into the couch, get some buddies over, lose 8 hours.

Nowadays, I almost exclusively prefer 4x and turn-based strategy games because... I don't know, honestly. They're more relaxing. Sometimes I'll pick up an humble bundle (that's how I got turned onto Monaco, along with some other fantastic games that don't fit my 'paradigm' these days) and enjoy it immensely, but most of my purchases are your Civilizations, your Age of Wonders, your Dominions and your Galactic Civs. I have sunk a depressing amount of time into Dwarf Fortress.

I have continued with the Fallout series; nostalgia value can be pretty effective on me, even though I should know better. The new Fallout games have been good, sometimes great, but I know full well I'm not going to have the same experience I did playing the old ones on the PC as a kid. But something about that brand, along with Elder Scrolls, keep me coming back even though those games aren't "my thing" anymore. Not sure if I can really explain why, because I don't really understand it myself.

tl;dr used to play everything, now mostly turn based strategy. huge nerd, I like games because they let me escape from real life and also make it easier for me to hang out with people.

[danzibr]

You reminded me of something friend. In school I never did sports or the math team or anything. I had friends in school but rarely hung out with anyone later. I played games to stave off not only boredom but probably loneliness too.

[TeChameleon]

38-year-old gamer here, started on... I think it was my dad's old Colecovision, but I couldn't swear to it, as my memory is a bit foggy on that point; also around that point in time, we got an NES, there was a Commodore 128 computer in the house that my two younger brothers and I were allowed to play games on, and I remember my dad getting our family's first computer when I was about ten (a Commodore PC 10-III... an old 8088-based machine), which I was promptly fascinated by.

My earliest gaming memories are of some of Sierra's adventure games (Police Quest and Space Quest), Movie Monsters (on the Commodore 64), Sid Meier's Pirates! (one of my all-time favourites), an old Mickey Mouse edutainment game that I can't for the life of me recall the name of, Broderbund's Stunts (which I played for years after it was well and truly obsolete, thanks to the track editor... well, that and my desire to build tracks specifically to annoy my younger brother :smalltongue:), Civilization and SimCity.

Oh! Also, the old BBS games Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, played when we got a 2400 baud modem not long after the PC. Fun but frustrating, as apparently it's not just war that never changes, but also trolling :smallannoyed:

Nowadays, I still play a reasonably broad variety of games... RPGs, RTS-es and 4x-types do make up the bulk of them, but the occasional adventure game, platformer, racing game, puzzler, space combat sim, MMORPG, brawler, and (far more occasionally) fighting game and FPS do fill in the cracks pretty solidly. Also whatever the heck Goat Simulator is :smalltongue: I am also fortunate enough to be married to a wife who's a gamer as well, although not as avid a one as myself (seems to be somewhat typical...)- we typically play co-operative-type games, or else kibitz on one another's single-player games, depending on moods.

[Driderman]

I'm not sure I love video games at all. There's a few games I really like. But I was exposed to that stuff from since I was around 5 or 6, with very little to no supervision on the matter so I spent all of my formative years pretty much turning gaming into an integral part of who I am and what I do. Sometimes I almost hate it, actually, but for the most part I've learned to manage my time so as to not wreck my life completely on a very habit-forming pastime that I was most likely exposed to far too early.

I grew up on adventure games, strategy games, old school rpgs and platformers, like pretty much anyone who was born in the early 80's I guess. My favorites were always usually the more "cerebral" type games, so more on the strategy side than the platformer side, although I loved games like Flashback and Another World as well.
I played the longest game sessions of the original Sid Meier's Pirates! because English isn't my first language and every time I clicked 'Divide up the plunder' I thought the game asked me if I was angry due to the similarity of words, and I always clicked 'no' :smallbiggrin:

[Eldariel]

Got my NES at the tender age of 5. Before that I'd played a bit at arcades and with public show consoles. I've played ever since; as I'm 30 now, that makes 25 years.

Far as experience goes, I started with NES and SNES and moved almost entirely to PC gaming around '96-'97; I've only played C64, Sega, PSX, N64, various handhelds and such at friends' or with emulators. As you'd probably expect of anyone with such a generous amount of years in gaming, I've played basically all the genres across the board, from the various arcade shoot 'em ups (Novastorm jumps to mind), platformers (all the big titles on NES/SNES) and oldschool adventures (Sierra/Lucas Arts/Westwood) to space simulators (from Wing Commander 4 to I-War/Freespace 2), flight simulators, driving games, RTS, TBS, RPGs, various shooter & fighting games, and various other categories and some fairly unique games that fall outsize easy categorization. I'd say the genres that have ultimately given me the most are RPGs, RTSs, TBSs and space sims, though Adventure & Platformer games of yore come close too.

The biggest single period in my gaming was probably the Starcraft/Brood War period which started around 2000 and lasted until the release of Starcraft 2 in 2010 - I've played a lot of Brood War, both melee and UMS. Nowadays it's mostly some online games types with friends, such as League of Legends or Warframe (LotRO, DDO, Guild Wars 2, Gunz, etc. at various points too) - though I've gotten around playing through what I still enjoy the most, some of the more recent story-based RPGs with Mass Effects & The Witchers being big standouts of the more modern releases.


Indeed, perhaps the first thing that sells almost any single player game for me is an engaging story with interesting characters. Good game mechanics are a plus (and indeed, sometimes they are the primary reason I find a game engaging), but the games I find myself truly getting drawn into are the story-based games like Monkey Islands, Grim Fandango, Chrono Trigger, Jagged Alliance II, Final Fantasy 6, Max Payne, Half-Life, Baldur's Gates, Freespace II, Mass Effects, Fallout I/II, Planescape: Torment, etc. The more dynamic the game, the better. Unfortunately deep story with good characterization and dynamic, varied choices throughout the game are often at odds with each other and games that try to implement both often fail at both. As such, even after all these years the list of gems that both, enable me to come back and absolutely sucked me in the first time is terribly short. Luckily one or the other done well can carry the other half a fair way. Many of the games I've drawn incredible enjoyment out of railroad you rather heavily, but if the story is good enough, I'll easily put up with that for a few playthroughs. Hell, great stories that you'd barely classify as "games" such as Visual Novels (e.g. Fate/Stay Night or Tsukihime) would also fall here, if we consider them gamelike enough to list.

The games that are dynamic but come with just a flimsy framework of a story such as the Bethesda Mod Platforms or Elite-style games (and their more modern variants such as Space Rangers II) haven't appealed to me as heavily though. I've played them some and getting to build my own game is sorta cool but me enjoying the whole relies heavily on having the kind of story I want to play available. As such, for me the story-side is clearly more important than the dynamicness even if in the ideal game that I'd play for the rest of my life I'd have vast amounts of both.


One other aspect I draw a lot of enjoyment out of is challenge and competition. No matter the game, be it Doom, C&C, Warcraft, Red Alert, Starcraft, Street Fighter II (SS2T in particular), Counterstrike, League of Legends, Civilization X, Alpha Centauri, Combat Mission X, Close Combat II, Master of Orion X, any Total War, or something as silly as Nintendo World Cup (or indeed, non-computer games such as Chess, TicTacToe, Go, or just about any board/cardgame), I tend to spend a lot of time working on analyzing and repetition in order to improve to try and beat/outperform my friends. With the advent of broadbands, this extends to the random strangers I run into online. Back in the 90's, it was mostly LAN parties at school or friends' and playing together at a computer club; the dial-up games online in e.g. Red Alert or Warcraft II were rare indeed with parental supervision of the internet use. Either way, whether it's trying to finish levels cooperatively (and seeing who does the best) or beating friends up, besting my own performance and measuring up to others is something that always energizes me to strive to do even better. Old NES games such as Guardian Legend, Battletoads, Megamans, Castlevanias, etc. really served me well in developing a tolerance for what's colloquially known as "artificial" difficulty and incredible amounts of repetition and finding joy in success and overcoming unlikely odds, particularly as the first of my friends.

As such, constantly losing to my betters in an online game similarly spurs me to improve and find joy in noticing the improvement. Make no mistake, while a lot of these games are about beating the other player, I don't really care about that as anything but a gauge: the one I want to surpass is always myself. Others serve mostly as a measuring stick to that end; I derive how hard something is to accomplish from how many other people can do it or how highly ranked the opponent I beat in some PvP system was (and the manner of my victory; I don't value getting "cheesy" wins all that much). Of course, this trait also causes me to value game balance in competitive games; I like to think to win and games that have superoppressive strategies that vastly outperform all others are thus of little interest for solving purposes, and a somewhat one-dimensional measuring stick that doesn't really spur me to improve myself. I also like to take pupils with similar interests, teach them what I know and see others grow in the same set of skills I've developed and open new doors and enjoy of their improving performance. This comes back to the cooperation aspect and the appeal of the massive NES games such as Guardian Legend, the Legend of Zelda & co. where the main source of enjoyment was cooperatively trying to map the world, sharing discoveries and theorizing/thinking together about how to overcome any which problem.


Really, that about covers the big factors that make games work for me: Story & Characters, Dynamic Story, Difficulty & Challenge, Intuitive & Engaging Gameplay, Balance & Variety (in the challenge-enhancing way)

Though in the present, studies, dancing (and few less time-consuming hobbies) and relationship have taken most of the time I used to be able to funnel into gaming so at least for now, this particular hobby is on the backburner.

EDIT: I realize I didn't really answer why I play video games, just what I like in video games and which types of games I play. The why, well, it was motivated by video games being an engaging pastime long ago - having an activity, improving in it, and building social networks around it provides me with various sources of enjoyment, more-so than most other pastimes I could find at the time. Now, it's more motivated by the social networks I have around various games far as multiplayer goes, and experiencing stories in single player - ability, while still important to me, is secondary. Self-improvement takes time, and time is something I have precious little of right now. While I do still e.g. play Starcraft II campaigns on Brutal with the goal of getting all the Achievements and Feats of Strength, I'm more like to postpone some superdifficult thing and just go through the campaign to see the final resolution. That is to say, I seem to primarily want to experience the stories and only secondarily feel satisfaction in accomplishment now.

[Sajiri]

My family got a N64 around the time I was 7ish I think, and an xbox years later, but until I finished high school I was only allowed to play games on friday and saturday nights after 5pm (unless it was a rainy weekend and I couldnt go outside, then dad would let us rent a game out). It was around when I was 17 that I started playing my first MMO- ragnarok online. 18-20ish I think I developed a bit of a gaming addiction, specifically with Final Fantasy XI, but some other mmos as well, since my life wasnt going so great and I was having issues where I wasnt really enjoying being on online games anymore, but I was feeling a lot of anxiety if I wasn't. After I got married I started trying to tone it down and only play games in moderation.

I found that when I have unrestricted playtime I start to get miserable and the games just aren't as enjoyable. Although that's often these days since Im unable to work or even walk some days, so I try to set rules of when to play games (namely after getting a lot of housework done) and treat gaming as a reward or priviledge for myself.

The sort of games I like, obviously MMOs. I like games where you can create and customise your own character (build and appearance) and roleplay in a sort. Much the same with single player games. I like to see them as interactive stories. Im not so big on shooters or first person games, or JRPGs, there are some exceptions though. The type and tone of the game Im into can vary wildly. I can be playing Harvest Moon on the 3DS, and then Saints Row on xbox right after. Im not so into any games featuring PVP anymore, or playing with strangers in MMOs since I like to just relax and take my time and not feel rushed if I want to get into it and enjoy everything around me

[Forbiddenwar]

Read Reality is Broken
http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change/dp/1594202850
Or watch this:
https://youtu.be/MyUC_28HIvA

I feel it explained well in those media, from personal to sociological.