Adventures in Teenage Gaming: I’m a Staying in Kind of Guy

From a very young age, I was set on entering the world of sports journalism. I never played pretend by harassing local Sunday league football players about illicit affairs with my mummy but I had this innate desire to want to write about football for big newspapers and have my name in black on white.

That dream quickly subsided when the crushing reality of how hard it is to become a successful sports journalist was realised. I wasn’t going to learn the ins and outs of major competitive sports while attending bitterly cold Wednesday afternoon P.E. lessons: I was too busy forgetting my kit or playing hockey with the shittiest stick in the bucket to be learning anything useful…

Weirdly, it was around the time I first started trying to play sports like football and tennis as hobbies that I developed an interest in things that would inherently leave me incapable of participating in a game of football or tennis for more than a few minutes without tiring. I don’t have any real memories of a first goal scored or a first ace made: I more strongly remember the mornings watching Friends and playing Tazmanian Devil* on the Gameboy.

To this day I have kept that love for writing but now it goes hand in hand with a love for videogaming & a more recently developed passion for moving image**. I still want to write for a living, but over a decade on from when I discovered yellow bricks with batteries I’m the one that wants to stay in, play games and watch films while the world around me goes out.

As a university student I’m expected to do what my peers do, and by that I mean get really drunk, do something stupid, miss lectures the next day and wake up with horrible realisations. Instead, I stay indoors playing Borderlands, watching films from the 80s and browsing the internet laughing immaturely at funny photoshopped pictures like this one. I am currently living in student accomodation with several other people in close promixity and they all like to go out. I like to stay in. I’ve been labelled a geek but I’m okay with that; I’d rather do what I want to do than be who I’m not.

I am definitely a gamer, and almost certainly a geek. As a gamer now in university I’ve been exposed to over the last few years as well as very recently a number of a range of different people who live different lifestyles and enjoy different things, all of whom have been exposed to videogames in one way or another. You can see several classes of gamer from even just a quick glance.

This is the gaming class system I see:

• The judge: Someone who hates videogaming and refuses to play games on the grounds that it makes your eyes go funny and playing videogames makes you a bad human being who hates Jesus.
• The viewer: someone who probably owns a Wii or DS and would associate, if asked, the word ‘commodore’ solely to the military.
• The experimenter: Someone who’s played a games console not made by Nintendo in the last five years and who may have clocked some time in the arcade as a child – they may own a videogame console or play games with their children/friends from time to time but never get that videogame crave.
• The frequent flyer: Someone with a console or desktop, usually next-generation, who will play/have played a lot of Fifa, Modern Warfare, The Sims or a game of similar mass-appeal – they maintain a strong social identity, never classing themselves as a gamer unless bragging rights occur. If a game isn’t easy to play, is slow and story-driven, doesn’t have guns/women/sport in it and/or has an art style, it will not interest this class.
• The golden gamer: Someone with at least one games consoles old and new. Someone who has definite videogame talent, a good knowledge of videogames old and new – manuals aren’t necessary – and can pick up pretty much any game and play. The definitive gamer.
• The post-modern whippersnapper: Normally younger players with a youthful arrogance, who considers themselves to be a true gamer despite having never owned a videogame console pre-1990. Can play a variety of genres with ease but has difficulty playing games that are 8 or 16-bit, try as they might – can talk the talk but can’t often walk the walk.

I slide awkwardly in between the latter two classes, having been born into the N64 era. I can try and convince myself I’m the best kind of gamer but having never owned a SNES I don’t consider myself to be the ‘golden gamer’ I want to be and never will be. We are moving into a generation where the Gameboy is considered an artefact of videogame history, where more and more ‘frequent flyers’ emerge and ‘viewers’ become ‘experimenters’ and I will go kicking and screaming like the Will Ferrell man-child I am.

The introduction of casual gaming has buried the golden age of gaming deep to the confines of eBay auctions with ‘expensive’ pricing and dusty retro sections. There may be some brilliant games for great games consoles at the moment but we are moving into an era of videogaming that in my view sullies eras of gaming I hear nothing but good things about (I will not be buying the overpriced abomination that is Kinect – I may have to buy a high-priced ‘antique’ Dreamcast out of ironic principle).

I lost my 60GB Playstation 3 today, most likely due to a combination of old age and over-use, and really this first account of my life as a teenage gamer should be an obituary to a videogame console that has provided years of high-quality entertainment. However, as well as slowly introducing you the reader to the world I live in, I intend to pay tribute to and thank those from the prior generations of videogames that this generation takes for granted.

Without the videogames of old we wouldn’t have Borderlands. Thank you, middle-aged gamers. Give yourselves a pat on the back and a prostate exam, or whatever you crazy veterans do to pass the time nowadays.

* What a game that was: it had a difficulty brick wall though…

** *wink wink nudge nudge*