Experiences With Gaming
Like many American kids in the 90s, I grew up playing games. Candyland and Chutes and Ladders in early childhood led to Monopoly, Risk, Oregon Trail at school. Games were so ubiquitous in American culture during my childhood that I don’t believe any of us thought of ourselves as “gamers” in the way that’s become an “identity” in modern culture. We just played games.
We were one of the original video game generations - I was born in ‘83, so I missed the Atari but I remember playing Duck Hunt and Mario on the Nintendo with kids in my neighborhood when I was 5 or 6, and Super Nintendo was a Very Big Deal. My first console was a Sega Genesis a few years later, and I loved playing Sonic the Hedgehog, Ecco the Dolphin, TMNT, Streets of Rage and many others.
Gaming experiences back then were often social and shared between two or more people. I was an only child, so for me social gaming happened at friends’ houses or with my dad. I also gravitated towards games that were still enjoyable with only one player. When I was in grade school I remember playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat at sleepovers. It makes sense in retrospect, since the quick game length, entertainment value for spectators, and winner-stays format were perfect for bigger groups. Goldeneye and sports games like FIFA, Winning Eleven, NBA2k, and Madden would also fill that multiplayer/social role as the years went by. Some of that social element has been lost, or at least changed, in modern culture where multiplayer video games are played over a network connection rather than by two people in the same room.
As I grew older and we got our first personal computers, games were ever-present there as well. At first we had Dos games, composed of letters and characters. These included Space Invaders (my favorite), and an ancient text based RPG. My dad and I would map out the levels on printer paper to navigate around. Years later, my dad and I played Myst together, which felt very much like a spiritual successor to those early text-based RPG’s. When I was older, I played tons of SimCity and Civilization, and always loved turn-based and sandbox games more than realtime games like Warcraft.
When I was at summer camp in 1993, they had this game called Magic: the Gathering. Like many other American kids I’d collected baseball cards, and I immediately loved Magic. Looking back, part of what made the game so great was how perfectly the fantasy flavor matched the mechanical elements of the game. This made it super intuitive and resonant, and was something we could wrap our imaginations around. I also played role-playing games back then - mainly Shadowrun at Star Wars - and Magic definitely had a roleplaying element for us, in terms of being an outlet for our imaginations.
Mark Rosewater, for years the lead designer of Magic, has said that Magic is a game that teaches players game design. When you construct a deck, you have to make choices that determine the type of game you’d like to have. What’s more, players’ decks become an expression of their identity.
I’ve always had an urge to create, and for a while that mainly meant music and writing. More recently, I’ve begun to apply that creative impulse to game design, drawing upon my varied experiences playing games. In future posts, I’ll talk about some of the games I’ve been working on and share some of my thoughts about game design. Until next time, may you find the games that enrich your life and bring you joy!