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Gaming

The earliest video games I played were PC racing games -- specifically the 1996 titles Grand Prix 2 and Rally Championship. This was a byproduct of my father's love for Formula 1 and distaste for video games. It meant that we didn't own a console but that, for this specific genre, an exception could be made on the family computer.

The rules relaxed over time and I was allowed to play "intellectual" historical strategy games like Caesar III and Civilization II. I also had access to some platformers like Aladdin, The Jungle Book, and The Lion King, which gave me a good taste of failure without save points.

For Christmas 2004, not long before my 13th birthday, I was floored to discover that my father had purchased us a PlayStation 2. With it came my first introduction to 3D action-platformers in the form of Ratchet & Clank. I was a huge fan, eventually writing guides and fan-fiction. At some point in time, I was even the top contributor to the game's Wikia.

Though I loved games and always wanted to play more, I never really got to do it freely or very often. I remember on one birthday being allowed a single hour of gaming time -- if I'd first done my chores. But eventually, I was introduced to online games for the first time via browser base-builders, and after getting my own laptop, I was able to truly feed the gaming monkey on the shoulder.

Throughout 2008, I put a remarkable number of hours into a now-defunct browser game called Wild Isle. It had a small but active community that gave me my first taste of online socialization through gaming. There was drama. There was conflict. There were secret 5 a.m. raids and bitter rivalries. It was a lot of fun and I have many fond memories.

After that came World of Warcraft, which consumed my life and which I refuse to touch again, just to avoid dumping further ungodly amounts of playtime into it. I was pulled out of there by League of Legends, and then, finally, in 2013, I built my first PC. Goodbye, overheating laptops -- and goodbye to ever devoting that much time to any single game again.

With a gaming PC and access to more titles than ever before, my tastes diversified. Today, I enjoy all kinds of games. RPGs, shooters, racing games, strategy games, puzzle games, simulators, story-rich, competitive, you name it. I think the only type of game I never really explored is fighting games ... unless you count Smash Bros., but I wasn't very good at it anyway.

In recent years, I don't play as much as I used to. That sense of discovery I had upon first arriving on the shores of Darkshore, or coming out of that cave in Skyrim, is hard to recapture. There are other things to do and other hobbies to nurture. I doubt I'll ever again play as much as I did from the period right of high school to my early 30s. And that's OK. But I doubt I'll stop entirely, and as long as I keep playing, I'll also keep writing.