mixed habitat & densely vegetated hiding places

sunshine_revival's next challenge is:

The Midway
Journaling prompt: What games do you play, if any? Are you a solo-gamer or do you view games as a social activity?
Creative prompt: Write a story/fic around the theme "game night".

Well, since you asked. :P

I've played video games for as long as I can remember. My dad was an early adopter of technology and he brought home an IBM clone in the late 1980s, when I was in grade school. He would download tons of games from BBSes for my brother and me. Sometimes these were pirated games from big companies, but this was also a huge heyday for what we would now call "indie" games—stuff coded by one guy in his basement or a couple of college students in the computer lab. Platformers, shooters, puzzle games, arcade clones, roguelikes, RPGs, text adventures, you name it, we played it. Often we didn't know what a game even was until we ran it, because while the original BBS post might have explained what it was, all we saw was an EXE filename that was limited to eight characters.

I think gaming was always social for me. Some of the early games my brother and I played did have hot-seat multiplayer (alternating who's sitting at the keyboard) but if it was a single-player game we'd just take turns, and shamelessly order each other around if we thought the other wasn't playing it right. XD When I got a little older and more of my friends started to have computers or consoles at home, inviting people over to play games was a huge thing. I was just recently reminiscing about going over to my friend's house to play Myst, which was a massive phenomenon in 1993. We were young and the logic puzzles were too hard for us, so it would just degenerate into heckling the game and each other until we collapsed in hysterical laughter. That's still one of my favorite gaming memories... and I still don't think I've ever actually beaten Myst.

I was a young adult when online games became a thing, and I was all over that. I was going to say my first was RuneScape, but actually I'd been playing some "tabletop" RPG campaigns over email before that, when I was in high school. (And if you're wondering if that would take forever and constantly suffer from players disappearing without saying anything: YES.)

Then World of Warcraft came out. Oh boy. I loved the game, but it was the social aspect that kept me playing—which I learned could be a double-edged sword. I met so many incredible, brilliant people, some of whom are still my friends, now my oldest friends. But when I started, oh god, I was 23, and not a mature 23. In many ways WoW was a crash course for me in how to relate to other adults, how to deal with conflict and complex group dynamics, how to keep my temper under pressure, and how badly things can blow up when you fail at this stuff. I did some really dumb things in that game (socially, I mean, not like, falling in lava and dying—though I certainly did that too) but I did learn from it, and a lot of those lessons have been surprisingly applicable to other areas of life. Everywhere, people are people. (You also probably don't want to fall in lava IRL either.)

But MMOs do have a way of taking up all available gaming time, so playing WoW kind of got me out of the habit of playing single-player games. Or other multiplayer games. Or any non-WoW games. Even after I became more of a casual/occasional WoW player, it took a while for me to realize that I missed the days of being a kid and just jumping into different games and seeing what was out there.

Over the past few years I've been playing more games again (and we're in another indie gaming boom era, not unlike the late '80s/early '90s) and part of how I've been motivating myself is to post on DW about what I'm playing. I really enjoy the process of writing reviews—it helps me think about my own preferences and responses to things, as well as helping me not completely forget the media I have consumed after I consume it. >_< I think it also makes it feel more social for me, telling others about the games I play, even if I play by myself. (Though I do also play multiplayer games with friends sometimes.)

Right now I tend to play a mix of new indie games, oldies (and sometimes weirdies) from my childhood, and old games that I missed at the time. Point-and-click adventures are a favorite genre of mine, which is great timing, because with all the free tools available now they're one of the easiest genres for solo devs or small teams to do, so there are a lot of new ones I can mix in with the old LucasArts and Sierra classics. You can see my reviews in my games tag if you like. :)