Yesterday was game day, and no I don’t mean football in any shape, form, or fashion. The kid and I were both up early and he asked me to bring in my character to help him level his up a bit in Hellgate: London. He was having trouble with one of the first bosses because he picked a marksman class. They do really high damage, but need to be at range, so basically he wanted me to hold the monster’s attention while he slaughtered it. I know there are a ton of articles out there both denouncing and praising the effects of video games on kids and society in general but I think everyone should make up their own minds on the matter. Gaming is something that you either get or you don’t, and I can’t begin to tell you about the comments I get because 1. I’m an actual female, 2. I buy games for my kid and play with him, 3. I don’t get upset when my husband wants to play games ( usually because I’m in there right along with him)
I’ve always loved games, and used to spend the afternoons at the arcade when school was done. We had an Atari growing up and later a computer where I got hooked on Zork and after a few hints and such did eventually manage to get through it. When I went off to college, my then husband and I had a Nintendo system and I played through the Zelda games as they came out, along with some of the arcade games we loved so much. He stopped playing at some point and now thinks that games are pretty much a waste of time. Then again, this is the same guy that I wrote about a few days ago, so take that for what you will.
We got divorced, but stayed on speaking terms because of the kid, and I started playing more games, because frankly being a single mom it was something to do at night other than watch tv. I had a crappy little computer that I inherited in the split and I slowly started replacing the hardware as I could, so I could play the stuff I wanted to, like Phantasmagoria and later, StoneKeep.
Some time in the middle of all of this I was online pretty regularly and found an awesome game called Dragon Realms, it was a text based role play game. I remember playing with the kid sitting in my lap occasionally, and reading the text out like a story to him. The best part of the community there was that they actually did role play, and because it was text based, it was easy for world events to occur pretty spontaneously, usually on holiday weekends. I also played around on some story writing sites and such, but that’s another post altogether.
I met my current husband online. That’s yet another post as well. I knew he was a keeper because we spent our first phone call, him in London, and me here in the states, talking about the merits of blunt weapons over blades. Yeah, that pretty much did it. He had me for the rest of my life when we spent our first Christmas together. He flew over and within a day or so we went to the store for a new graphic card and monitor. Now you have to remember that I was still playing mainly in a text based environment. I did have a run with EQ but being on dial up and having limited time to actually play, it really didn’t do it for me. I didn’t really think about the fact that my machine back then probably wasn’t up to running something like that to start with and I never got the full benefit of it. Oh well….
So here we are, Christmas week, and I have a new spiffy graphic card and I’m about to pee myself because everything looks so brilliant. He had bought me a copy of the new Tomb Raider game and we spent the entire week swapping places as we took turns killing Laura(it happens, she falls off stuff, things roll over here, there’s no way around it). I think we managed to get about half way through the game within a couple days, but at that point it really didn’t matter. I was hooked even more than before both on games and the guy I have.
My kid learned to read playing Pokemon on a Game Boy, it was easier than asking us what the screen said all the time. All three of us play WoW as well, and now Hellgate. The husband and I are both into more of the fantasy, run around and quest thing, while the kid prefers the run around blowing things up type games, but the fact is that all of us do it together. We still do all the “normal” stuff like movies, sports and such, but it’s a blast spending a weekend morning all hooked into a chat panel (because our machines are in different rooms) with our various characters, blasting our way across what’s left of London. It’s all about doing things as a family, it really doesn’t matter to me what it is as long as we have fun doing it.
