Tip: unless otherwise stated, it’s best to read my articles with a warm drink and some Amethystium for background music.
Having been a lurker here for a while, I’ve finally pushed myself to post something. Not sure quite where to start here…
But Here Goes…
My name is Jessica, I’m 26 (…I almost typed that I was ‘level 26’…gah, way to go…) and I live in Norway with my husband. Born and raised in the Southern US, I moved to Norway after meeting (and marrying) my Norwegian sweetie of six and a half years.
We are both gamers and spent a lot of our time playing World of Warcraft together when we were apart – me living in the US and him only able to visit a couple times to the states. We each have our own kinds of other games that we like that the other doesn’t, and so far our only common tie has been WoW and D&D.
Getting into games, and staying on a budget
A fairly high percentage of my life growing up I had to deal with getting foodstamps from the government, as my father was mentally ill and couldn’t work. So when it came to gaming, I was on quite a tight budget. As a result, my dip into the gaming pool isn’t going to be near as up to date or as wide as many may be who have played many, many games over their lifetime. But I’m the oldest of five girls so I’ve had plenty of family to play games with; both sides of my family loves to play games, in fact.
Atari
My gaming experience started when my grandparents on my mother’s side had an old Atari they still kept around. They let me and the second youngest sister play it when we were good and did what was asked of us (which was often!). I don’t remember much about those times other than Pong for sure just by name. I don’t remember any others by name but I can remember them as I think back to those times.
PC
My uncle that lived there at the time was (and still is) a big gamer and we got to sit in his room with him and watch him play his games. He didn’t seem to mind as long as we didn’t make a lot of noise (we were fairly quiet kids, so that wasn’t a problem). Most of gaming with PC games and D&D came from that uncle. Always watching him play games on the computer and looking in his D&D books. I didn’t understand a dang thing I was reading, but I loved the pictures and thought up stories to go with them, hoping one day I could learn to play too. My mother had a PC too, but I don’t remember playing a lot of games on it. I do remember playing Diablo 2 with the sisters, but it being a one-person game, we all had to share the character and could only spend a certain amount of time on the computer before the next sister could get on. We’d all crowd around that one sister currently playing and try to tell her what to do in the game and freak out when something scary happened like the zombies walking around.
N64 & SNES
On my father’s side, my father also played games, but mostly the N64. My most favorite games to play alone on that console were Star Wars, Pilot Wings, and Starfox. We also had an SNES that I played a lot with my sister. Donkey Kong 1 & 2 were our favorites to play together.
My mother had an N64 too and I played a LOT of Pokemon Stadium with all the siblings, all of us having to make sure to share but still thought it awesome that we could play mini games together.
Gameboy Color
I had a GBC for a while, having saved up allowance over the summer to get one. That’s when I was able to play Pokemon more, but I can’t remember if it may have been my uncle that I was borrowing a gameboy from before getting one or what, that was so long ago. I had the Red version and the second oldest had Blue version. I later got Silver and Yellow. Went to a few events at a local book store that held card and game tournaments and we had a lot of fun. I remember my uncle would take us on the weekends we were visiting. It was our time alone we got with him and it was awesome.
PS1
I remember my mother giving me a PS1 at some point but with it being used, it didn’t last very long at all. The game she got with it, FF7, didn’t work. The third disk never worked so I didn’t get to finish the game. I tried to play Soul Reaver but the screen was far too dark and there may have been something wrong with the controls….so I remember not being able to play anymore after a while. I had a Monster Rancher 2 game that a friend gave to me one year but it didn’t work again after I put it in a PS2 that my sisters had for a while. The game would never work on the PS1 again. I still have the game but fairly useless now without a way to play it. But I keep it for memory’s sake. A game I really loved from a friend I cared greatly about.
The importance of used games & consoles
That’s pretty much it for my background for gaming besides a bit of PC with Baldur’s Gate and a demo of Planescape: Torment that a friend let me borrow. Neither game I was able to finish, again. I didn’t get a lot of time playing PC games. Not something my father liked. I still have so many awesome memories of having to share computers with my sisters as well as controllers. It was a pain a lot of times, of course. But looking back on those times, I loved every bit of it and still do.
A lot of our games and consoles were used, so they were cheap when we got them, but we didn’t see any difference. They were still games and we still loved playing them.
From the look of things nowadays, this is highly frowned on… hated even. Being able to resell consoles and games are considered not fair or not right when we wouldn’t even know of these things when we did if we didn’t have a chance to get them. …As you can tell, that isn’t a very happy topic for me, yet one for another time, I believe. This introduction has gone longer than I expected it to.
What’s next
I have plans of what I want to start writing about here, but how I will go about them is still being thought out. You see, I have social anxiety (Avoidant Personality Disorder, Agoraphobia, and some traits of Dissociative Disorder) and that is one topic I’d like to cover in more than one article. I want to discuss my views on how I have been able to still play games with these roadblocks, what I’m doing to help myself through this, and whatever else on the topic I can think of to write. It will be a slow-burner of a topic to write on, though. This is because writing and thinking too far into the past can mess up one’s recovery (as I’ve been warned by my Psychiatric Nurses, I have two because one knows more English than the other but she also has fewer days that she works…so they work together to work with me).
Other topics I have planned for between the ones about social anxiety are many, but the ones that come to mind at the moment…
- Adding my two cents on a few hot button topics, I think I may have a slightly different way of seeing some things than I’ve seen shared.
- Roleplay in MMOs, from places I love to visit to what comes to mind when I choose to create a character and level them. What they may be thinking, what they may be experiencing.
- I have a close friend that is doing artwork for a game that is being made, so I’d like to give them some more exposure and see what I can do to give their work justice.
These are just a few that come to mind but thought it was better to get all this out now before I chickened out again.
Until the next article, I hope to get some interesting feedback from each!
