Newbie

If someone had asked me last year (prior to my work on Learning Games to Go) whether I was a gamer or not, I’m quite sure I would have answered in the negative. I mean “gamers” were people with joysticks (or whatever the 21st century equivalent was…). I was definitely savvy with computers, but I had virtually no knowledge about the latest, hottest games and certainly didn’t own a joystick or a console or a whatever. But what do you know? It turns out that I am a gamer… and that I’ve been one for a long time.

Back when I was a boy (soon after the Earth cooled…), we only had a handful of TV channels and the VCR hadn’t been invented yet. And of course, there was nothing like video on demand or TIVO, either. So we had very few “choices” at the end of the day when it came to video media – there was either something kind of good on one of those snowy TV stations, or more often than not, there wasn’t.

So my Mom, my brother and I played a lot of games at night… at the kitchen table. Some of our favorites were Boggle, Yahtzee, Scrabble and of course, Monopoly. And we’d listen to music while we played – Steely Dan and Elton John, Elvis Costello and Patti Smith. And when we let my Mom have a go at the turntable, it’d be time for Mr. Barry White! It was great. I remember all of us laughing a lot and being super-competitive and feeling like such a close unit at the same time. It really was so much fun.

Now the games that we played were cool and well designed, and they’ve stood the test of time (they’re still out there…). But when I think back on it, it wasn’t the games that made those nights so much fun. It was the fact that we were playing those games together. Those games gave us a way to connect, especially during the tough times that every family has when we didn’t have a lot of words for our feelings (or at least didn’t want to say them out loud). Whatever else might have happened during the day, we knew that we’d be around the kitchen table at night… and each of us would be hoping to buy Boardwalk and Park Place.

So I’ve been a gamer for a long time.

And it seems like one of the overlooked components (at least, for me) of the new-fangled video games is the social element that indeed meant so much to my family and me a long time ago. In my work on this project, I’ve seen groups of kids gather around the lone computer in class so they can all be part of the game being played by the one lucky kid with the mouse. And then they talk about it afterwards… and before they play again. And then there are the online games where even folks who are by themselves in the real world can connect and socialize with other players around the globe, creating a giant “kitchen table” for game play.

So the social aspect of games is huge.

I see it around me. And I see it in my own experience (these days, with my two kids).

Games definitely help us to connect.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 10:58 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.