How I ended up gaming

The first friends I made in an online game. Here back in 2007, after beating Annúminas.

I've really enjoyed reading people's tales about their gamer history, so I thought it would only be fair to return the favour. Behold the story of how I ended up gaming (because there was no grand plan or dream involved, really).

This is my belated contribution to last week's Talkback Challenge "What made you a gamer?", including scouting some possible trends (if you may call them that with the NBI's relatively small dataset), my personal story and some thoughts about gamer as a label.

Tabletop games vs computer games

A lot of stories of my fellow NBI participants mention tabletop games (and D&D in particular) as their point of departure. For me this was very surprising: I never made the connection between the two. In fact, I dislike offline games with a passion. My friends will confirm this. When I was in my teens, I used to go camping with other young people regularly. It was a hardcore kinda thing, so our facilities were usually pretty primitive (no electricity, sometimes not even a loo). In the evenings, people tended to start playing cards, much to my dismay. I think I picked up playing the guitar and singing only because it gave me something to do those evenings. But that is for another story.

Online games, or computer games in general, create a totally different experience to me than tabletop games. (Obviously, otherwise this blog would've been subtitled "the rants of a masochistic girl"; or, more probable, wouldn't have existed at all.) For me, they represent two entirely different worlds.

My first "alt", rune-keeper Ravalinde, finishing the Barrow Downs with my kinnies, April 2009

The birth of a gamer

When I grew up, I did not game. My friends were into nature, pets; they weren't interested in games all that much. My parents allowed only for one hour behind the PC a day, which I mostly spent browsing the wonders of the early internet, which was new and exciting at the time. They were of the opinion that games were a waste of time, which I believed. I could be quite hard on myself and always would feel slightly ashamed if I had spent time doing something (I considered to be) useless.

My younger brother was more rebellious in this regard. He asked, and got, a Gameboy for his birthday. He saved up money to buy an XBox. It was through him that I was introduced to videogames: we both played Ninja Gaiden on the XBox and I eventually bought my own Pokémon games to play on his Gameboy. I still have fond memories of those gaming sessions. However, I would never have thought of myself as a gamer at the time.

It was only when I went living on my own that I developed gaming as a valid hobby. It happened during my first year at university. I was doing two studies instead of one and was studying until deep in the evenings on a daily base to keep up. I lived alone in a small room at the attic and was too exhausted to go anywhere in the one hour a day I had left to myself. Playing my newly created lore-master in the Lord of the Rings Online was extremely relaxing. It allowed me to immerse myself in a completely different world: one without stress and assignments, and one that offered new friendships. And somewhere during those first years of playing that MMO - I wouldn't be able to tell you when exactly even if you'd put a gun to my head - I started accepting that gaming was something I enjoyed and was worthy of the title hobby.

Like Paeroka of Nerdy Bookahs, it was only when I started playing an MMO and got in contact with other people through games that I could consider myself being a gamer.

LOTRO, 2010, making music in the 21st Hall, Moria, with members of a befriended kinship.

I am still hanging out with some of these guys as of today.

Last week, I wrote about how I generally don't like labels and don't identify as a geek or a nerd. I do, however, identify as a gamer. Why exactly is something that puzzles me up until today. I do have a theory.

Ever since I started gaming regularly, I've had to defend it as a hobby. In the offline world, I run into people who think of gaming as dangerous/addictive, unsociable or a waste of time (or a combination of the three). All the time. Women especially always seem to have their verdict ready (fellow women, we really need to relax a bit more) and I feel gaming is more easily accepted as a hobby when men admit they're into it.

When I started raiding, meeting up with people I knew through games in the offline world and, most of all, started living together with someone I met in an MMO, I gradually got more and more tired by avoiding gaming as a topic of conversation. It gets tiresome, too, to answer the question of how I met my boyfriend enthusiastically and get met with incomprehension over and over again.

 "But surely you can't form equally real relationships through gaming?"

I do understand the dangers of gaming addiction, and they shouldn't be trivialized. But, like Roger Edwards of Contains Moderate Peril said, everything you do in obsessive amounts is bad for you. The utterly negative stereotypes I get confronted with regularly don't do justice to gaming as a whole. Gaming is so much more.

I guess the sad truth is that by feeling forced to defend my gaming activities, I have spent a lot of time thinking about what games mean to me and how I perceive them. Now if you'd recreate me as a character in the Sims, I would have the trait 'stubborn'. The more you tell me gaming is weird or otherwise an unwanted characteristic, the more convinced I become of the opposite. I've always strongly believed that everyone should be allowed to express themselves in the way they want (unless, of course, this is harmful to others) and should be accepted doing that, and gaming is no different.

The funny thing is that I'm certain I wouldn't have given gaming so much thought without meeting resistance. In the end, it is non-gamers that made me identify as a gamer.