So I recently had a conversation with someone who said,
"I've never really played video games.
I don't get why people like them."
And while I feel that she kind of answered her own statement,
I felt compelled to talk about it because they've always been a big part of my life and since I was a kid I thought
there was no better way to make friends than inviting someone over to watch me play video games.
Now, if we go way back one of my first gaming
experiences was when I was about four years old and my dad gave me a Nintendo 64, and what made me really fall in love with
Nintendo was how they made me feel like I was something I could never be in real life;
an Italian man.
Now, the time my dad really didn't know what
videogames were and I remember he was just watching me play for a while, then after a bit
he said, "Wow, I can't believe how much content they can put in these games."
Then, a year or two later, when I was still playing the same game,
he seemed to think something might be wrong, and asked if I wanted some help.
I said I could figure out myself and it took me four years, but I got there and when Christmas came around,
he got me a brand new game as a present then my brother
gave me the strategy guide for it and said,
*whisper* "I hate to see you struggle."
In the end though, joke's on him;
I couldn't read, so since I was about 9 or 10,
one of my favorite genres of games has always been RPGs,
'cuz you don't need friends to play, and one of the first RPGs
I got into was Runescape and
well, what I liked about it was these you have all these different skills like wood cutting. fire making, fishing
and all sorts
of stuff you could level up and really make your character unique.
I figured hey, I can totally reinvent myself on here to be whatever I want to be that'll make me happy.
You know, it didn't work, but you know. Live and learn.
...which I didn't.
Now, I don't want to paint the picture that video games are always life's answer, because
when I was about 13 or 14,
like most kids my age
I was pretty self conscious and had a lot of emotions that I didn't know how to deal with.
I remember there was a real turning point for me
when I came home from school really frustrated with the other kids,
and I needed a way to vent out that anger and of course I knew not to take that out on anyone in real life
but shooting a computer player with a bow and arrow wasn't cutting it, so I left the fantasy games behind
and found something more realistic and first-person.
I went online, found someone, and even though my aim wasn't very good,
I remember actually saying
"Take that bitch"
as I was blasting them in the face.
But yeah, that's- that's how I discovered porn.
So after working through my emotions in POV,
I mean FPS
One of the best years of my life was when I was about 14 or 15. and
everyone was really excited about Starcraft/
Like most real-time strategy games, Starcraft was pretty brutal because you can never relax;
not only always doing something in the game,
you're always trying to improve your level of play by practicing outside the game,
and every day when I came home from school
all my friends would be in a skype call discussing our replays and how to get better, and
being one of the first big esports I thought
I want to be really good.
So, I played it about six hours a day for over a year to the point my life practically revolved around the game and
eventually after putting in a few thousand hours I got at the point
I was very briefly one of the top 10 on the ladder and got to play with some of the guys that I idolized.
Unfortunately that didn't last too long, and I was never quite good enough to go to tournaments to make money
but
after I left the game the first time I didn't regret any of the time I'd lost
because I truly achieved a goal that I set for myself, and I realized that even more for that experience
I would have missed some of the most valuable lessons. I've ever learned.
Like sex can wait.
And, no matter how good you are, there will always be a million Koreans better than you.
And so, since my Starcraft experience,
I haven't really played any video games because I can never really get into anything the same way again
and I barely touched a gamer controller all the way up until a few weeks ago when my dad moved and I had some old
stuff in his attic I had to go through and I came across my Nintendo 64 in all my games so
I took them home, had a good experience reliving some of those memories
but
not only that I even found my own Donkey Kong strategy guide, and just like I remembered. I barely used it
*Outro Music*
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