What started out as a planned series of posts regarding the games that influenced me the most has dragged on for so long that it barely makes sense keep writing about them, or me. But trips down memory lane are always fascinating, even if just to understand how you’ve como to look at games and yourself. So here’s part 2 of Formative Gaming. You can still read part 1 here.

“Careful with what you wish – you just might get it”

That always seemed a weird adage to me until I started playing videogames seriously. Not seriously as in refrain from smiling when plonking down Goombas or stop from laughing as I kept hearing Ultrakills being announced, but playing them with determination. At some point, entertainment and personal investment got terribly close and I would spend days hunting for excitement in digital format. Secret stars, secret paths, secrets doors, secret techniques, secret places, secret thrills. They would all be mine.

I began to realize excitement is bankable. Some developers know this – they’ve been reinventing the webs of competition, success and peer pressure, from old arcade game score tables to achievements and online leaderboards. But excluding the occasional bragging rights when surviving – and scoring – longer than whoever played cooperatively with me in games like Contra, it was never something that I chased after. Some part of me wanted to find out why others enjoyed confrontation so much but having fun was a much more pressing concern than impressing or humbling adversaries.

Until the day my father picked up a gamepad and said “let’s win this”.

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