In honor of the hilarious and fascinating series of stories being told over at Cody Reimer’s blog, I’ve decided to share a part of my gaming history. If you haven’t seen his 5 part series on his first time playing EQ, you need to go to the beginning and check it out. What I find most interesting is how parts of his narrative resonate so strongly with me, even though my first MMO wasn’t EQ but WoW. It seems it isn’t the names of the zones or toons or anything else, but rather there is a shared set of experiences that all people who play these types of games experience. So in that spirit, I’m going to share a little about some of the very first games I played.
At the risk of outing myself as a fake gamer, my gaming experience started as a lot of girls’ did: watching their brother play. I am not ashamed of this. In fact, I think it was an important part of my development as a gamer because before I ever pushed a button, I would develop a more meta-understanding of games. The first game I vividly remember was Super Mario Bros, the one that came with Duck Hunt packaged in. I loved everything about it: the sound, the visuals, the whole ambiance of gaming. I would sit in my basement (nicknamed the dungeon for its complete lack of windows… so in essence, the perfect gaming basement) for hours and days watching my brother play level after level. I would sit quietly, for he was older and I didn’t want to annoy him—though he may not remember me being so quiet, and watch the strategies and tricks and timing of the game. Eventually he would get tired or need a sandwich or have to go to hockey practice and I would get my turn. It was fun because I felt like each time I faced a level I knew exactly how to beat it. So without ever having actually played a level, I could beat it on the first or second try (no small feat for a little kid). So emerging from that was a confidence that I was good at this gaming thing.
When the Sega Genesis came out, I quickly began to separate myself from the previous gamer who watched and analyzed. Rather, I became the type to organize my friends around gaming sleepover weekends and started to compile a respectable number of games for just me. My favorite on the Sega was Toe Jam and Earl. My friend Stacy and I would spend entire days playing (I was always Earl, she was Toe Jam). Even when we didn’t have any more presents to open and ship pieces to find, we would just go to the hidden level and hang out with the hula girls in the hot tub. We also played quite a bit of Ballz, which I played recently as an adult and I really hated. It was the first fighting game I played on a console, and it was really suited for my age level since there was no blood or real violence of any kind. Just balls. I had played Mortal Kombat in the arcade, but I didn’t like the publicness of the arcade as much. Even then I felt the awkwardness of being a girl in places like that, where I could never suck at games without proving all girls sucked at games and where I always had to be performing.
I also, as nerdy as this may be, played one of my all-time favorite games on the Sega, The Lion King. Now, this was a great game for many reasons, but one specifically was that I was better than anyone else at it. Most of the time if I got really stuck on a level or a game I would ask my brother to beat it for me. But with The Lion King, he couldn’t beat it. Maybe it was because he hadn’t bothered to play the rest of the game, maybe it was because the game was constructed for me and me alone, I don’t know. But I know that it was me and me alone that could beat that game. And that felt good.
To be continued… A sneak peak to next week: Kid Chameleon.
