What's your history with Gaming culture?

[sageoftruth]

Well, as a little kid, I was an envious friend of a Nintendo owner. The friend was a pretty terrible friend thinking back, as were most of my 'friends' as a little kid. Aside from hitting me, bossing me around, using the classic "do X or I won't be your friend", and putting me down, he acted like he could call all the shots since he had the Nintendo.
Anyway, eager to please, my parents got me a Super Nintendo, so eventually I got to go, "Well, if you won't let me use your Nintendo, then I guess I won't let you use my Super Nintendo". A handy bargaining chip, and the start of a long life of gaming hobbyism. I started reading Nintendo Power magazine, renting games as Blockbuster Video, and in college, where I had my own suite full of gamer friends to share games with, my gaming horizons expanded even further.

 

[hermes]

I was a kid at the time of the Commodore 64 and the Atari. I remember playing them, but mostly alone. Growing in a small city meant there was no such a thing as "gaming culture", and only when I became a teenager and game renting, console kiosk and arcades were more of a thing I began to feel like part of a bigger culture (still small by the standards of small cities). I got into the Internet when I was 15, so I was never part of the gaming sites or forums culture until much later in life. I remember being around the only kid in the neighborhood that had a NES, and later becoming that kid when I got a SNES for my birthday.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I got internet back in 98 when I was 10, it took a few more years and a few more games like FF and pokemon as well as a general interest in anime to get me further in than just someone who played and loved games, though I always would engage in discussion about games with other people who liked them and did collect some magazines for a few years as well. I guess if we wanna think of pre youtube and social media times, around the year 2000 or so would be the starting point.


The biggest thing for me was finding out that the thing I most liked about games like final fantasy and tekken and breath of fire and so on was this thing called "anime elements". I was one of those few who both watched anime and played games but didn't know anime was different from other kinds of animation and it's own medium, despite loving it and watching voracious amounts of it. In Greece they use the same word for all animation. I didn't put it together with FF as to why I liked both. Going online however and discovering just how much anime was out there and how much some of it was similar to the games I liked made me gain an even greater interest in it and then in turn deepened my passion for games as well since now there was a big connection between my two passions that I was unaware of up until that point. I guess for me anime culture and gaming culture are inextricably linked, though of course some (usually western) games I like are entirely separate, but out of what I mostly play there's always something hearkening back to those elements that make Japanese games and anime be similar.

They call it "media mix" there, it includes anime, manga, games, novels, radio shows, visual novels, drama cds, the works. Trying to extract gaming from that net is like trying to extract an organ from a body and treat the organ as though that is a body in itself, that's at least how I see gaming and the facet of gaming-culture I belong to anyways.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I started gaming in the late ?80s when my folks got me an NES for Christmas. I and my friends stuck with it into the 16-bit generation which brought about the first real Civil War within gaming culture: Super Nintendo or Sega Genesis. Hundreds were killed, thousands more injured. I was on the Genesis side of the issue, even had a Sega CD when 32-bit was the new thing, then I saw the Nintendo 64 and my mind was blown; had to have it. I enjoyed it for a while, but being in high school at the time, gaming sort of lost my interest. After graduation, I started college and got my first ?real? job where I met my girlfriend (now ex-wife,) so those three things took precedence, and my N64 got put into a box and stowed away? Fast-forward to 2003? My girlfriend of 4 years and I were living together, and one day her best friend?s boyfriend brought over his PlayStation 2. I?d not touched a video game since 1999, so when he fired up his PS2 and Grand Theft Auto III, needless to say, I was pretty taken aback. My last memories of gaming were Starfox 64 and Goldeneye; I didn?t expect to see that huge, sprawling, interactive open world much less watch him pick up a prostitute whom he?d subsequently murder in an alley to get his money back. Games had certainly ?matured;? I wanted back in. I assumed I?d be getting a PS2, but just so happens, 2003 was the same year Microsoft introduced the Xbox, and lo and behold, the GTA Double-Pack (GTA II and Vice City) was being released for it as well. Wanting to have the latest and greatest, I opted for an Xbox, and the rest is history; I gamed consistently through 3 generations of consoles ever since up until very recently.

 

[Yoshi178]

started with either a PS1 or a Game Boy Color. i forget which one i got first but i'm pretty sure one of them was for christmas and one of them was for my birthday back in 1996.

then it's as follows

-PS1/GBC
-N64
-GBA
-Gamecube
-Xbox
-DS
-PSP
-Wii
-360
-3DS
-PS3 that we never ended up using
-Wii U
-Xbone
-Nintendo Switch

 

[NPC009]

My starting point for gaming was the Commodore 64 (with lots and lots of pirated games, because that is how thing were back then...), but aside from my siblings and cousin, I didn't have anyone to play with or talk to until the late 32/64-bit days. I did read magazines, though.

And then I got an internet connection. Suddenly there were all sorts of other games to talk to. Messsage boards were a thing of course, but does anyone remember Pok?mon Battle Simulator? It's how we played Pok?mon against people who weren't within a link cable's distance. Incredibly slow but oh so fun.

Anyway, message boards/forums were are mixed bag. There are some I still visit (occasionally), but the others fell into one of these categories:
Fandom I grew out of
Which is something that happens, no problems there.

Shitty community
So many communities are bad in one way or another. Some only survive because there are a few active posters who fill most of the boards themselves, some revolve around childish arguments and feuds between members (you know, basic internet drama), others were downright toxic. Like, they'd notice I'm female and ask for pictures and got all upset if I didn't want to post any, claiming I must be a fat ugly whore.

Community constantly attracting/housing people that were just batshit insane
Google Tedius Zanarukando if you want an example.

Dead
Sometimes, during you adventures on the old internet, you stumble upon the corpse of a message board. Circle of life, blablabla.

From 2006 or so onward, I started taking a more active rol within online communities within my own country. Managing forums, writing for websites and eventually magazines. Right now, I'm comfortably high up on the food chain, both online and offline. ... Which comes with its own problems. For instance, how would you handle a mentally disabled person who wants to be part of the community, but does not have to mental capacity to interact with most of the other members, and breaks rules all the time because he doesn't understand them all that well? Though... I guess I'm lucky, as I haven't seen anything as bad a threats of suicide and things like that...

The above is one of the reasons I still visit foreign/international forums. Here I can be anonymous and enjoy the discussions without worrying about mod/admin/CM responsibilities

Oh, and as for consoles, since the 32/64-bit days, I've have atleast two differencent consoles from each generation, and I tend to buy both Nintendo's and Sony's handheld systems. I've been getting into PC gaming again since Steam is just so convenient, but my system is an insult to PC gaming and I take pride in that, because if I'm going to be a contrarian, I'd better be one in the most harmless way possible.

 

[sXeth]

Flippin around BBSes and the early days of the internet proper for shareware. Though I didn't really engage, just looked up my games, picked up the interesting ones and moved on. A couple of Conventions, though not even vaguely close to what happens nowadays. More like flea markets where stuff was flogged then a spectacle or big social gathering. Off and on my mom would buy a gaming magazine.

There was a 90s show on (in Canada) called Video Arcade Top 10, which was sort of half-news show on entertainment combined with a game show, that showcased some games (and by obvious necessity, the hardware involved). Though I mostly remember it having Nintendo titles. The general premise was 4 kids would play this new game, and whoever got the farthest won. I don't think there was ever a significant amount of game even shown, or a big margin between them, since kids playing for 20 minutes under pressure of a contest situation on their first crack at a game really don't get far, lol. That and some of the title choices (probably paid placements, lets be honest) were just awful for it, like Zelda or Quest 64 that I recall).

On the broader definition of gaming, I was a big MtG fan in my early teens or so. Hanging out at the games/comic shop(not videogames though, weird how those don't really overlap) playing in tournaments for MtG or Risk or whatever. Never did get dragged into Warhammer by my friends though, prohibitively expensive and I'm a crap painter.

 

[barbieboy]

Ever since Diablo came out in PS, I knew this was the game for me but it took me months to finally overcome my fear on the supernatural. The game taught me a few things, "not all religious are good" and "darkness can be your friend". Through the years, I felt that the series are getting old and had to change my way of life into socializing rather than trapping myself in my own room for hours (or days). The only MMO that I found close to Diablo was a Webzen game called MU (and a mobile version called MU Origin). Though I spend most of my time in mobile, I would still go back to the roots where my gaming life was born.

 

[Kyrian007]

I was around for ET and the crash that destroyed home consoles until the NES came along. I still actually have my copy of ET. I remember school days, trading games with friends, sharing Nintendo Power magazines... I remember game rentals being a thing. I remember building my first gaming computer because I saw a friend playing X-Wing. In college I was in a tabletop gaming club, but several of us set up a computer lab network between several dorm rooms for gaming. I don't remember being part of an online community until after all of that. Before that the "community" was (for me) just the friends I had that loved games. It seems like I never had trouble meeting gamers and fitting in. Joined here in 2010 but had been aware of the Escapist for a couple of years before I did more than lurk.

 

[Tanis]

I recall skipping lunch so I could use that money to play at the arcade.

So, yeah...that's how long I've been in it.

Hell, I was part of the 'Final Fantasy Fanatic' group on MySpace back when CLOUD (instead of Kain) ran it.

I'm old...ish.