Saturday, August 10, 2013

Gamer Girl

I'm starting this blog back up because I'm trying to practice my writing. I haven't been very active in the writing world lately. I've been doing some freelance editing and I've come to realize that I miss writing. I'm going to try and post once or twice a week and see how that goes. I  may increase if I get properly motivated.I bought some writing prompt books for my kindle and I'm going to be using some of those I think. But today I'm going to start with something that's been on my mind recently; gaming.

I am a gamer girl. I'm not sure when that happened exactly. I was not really one when I was younger. I was a book girl. I never went anywhere without a book. I brought books to school, books in the car, books on trips, and books to read during commercials in front of the TV. I was never without a good book. Now, it's not that I stopped reading, I still have full bookshelves, but video games have taken over more of my free time. When I have a few free hours in an evening, I go and play my Xbox rather than sit down with a good book.

I played games in grade school, but it was mostly board games with the family. I was always very competitive. There were not a whole lot out there yet for video games. My family did not invest in a video game system like Atari or Nintendo. We had computers. In fact we had one of the first home computers, the Commodore 64. It was mostly for my Dad, but my brother and I both had a couple of games for it. As the computers progressed, so did our systems. My Dad tried to keep up with the latest technology that we could afford. However, even when I finally had my own computer, I still didn't have too many games. I used it mostly for school. My brother used his mostly for games. And it was Derek that bought the first game system, a Super Nintendo. I didn't really get to play that much, because it was his. Even so, we both still played computer games more often than games for the Super Nintendo.

Derek finally bought a Playstation 2 and we both spent more time playing on that system. By then I was out of high school and in my first year of college. In college I didn't really have time for games. But I did meet a few people that pulled me into gaming; video and tabletop. I spent a summer playing D&D with a group of friends. We played at David's house and he was as much into video games as he was into D&D. He had every gaming system I had ever heard of; plus several I didn't know even existed. We tried them all. He even gave me his old Xbox when her upgraded to the Xbox 360. It wasn't too long before I was playing more games than I had ever played before. After college, I even upgraded myself to the Xbox 360. I can  now spend several hours playing games. And, though occasionally I think I may be losing some of my literature chops, it hasn't stopped me from questing through Skyrim or beating up bad guys as Batman. I suppose as an escape, video games offer something unique. You can immerse yourself in a good book and feel for the characters and the world of the book. In a video game, you don't have to be emotionally invested in the characters to go out and kill things or find treasure. You can follow a storyline, or just beat people up, or play a sport, and you can succeed or fail on your own merit. That's a level of control that you can't really get from a book.

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