Hi SVGL readers! Many of you saw my Tweet last week asking about the ways you used to play pretend about video games with your friends as kids, and I've gotten some great responses from you guys.
But I need more, so here's the deal: When you were a wee game fan, did you used to play video game-related imaginary games about the stuff you were playing? Search drain pipes for Mario, hold Mortal Kombat matches at recess, fight over who got to be Ryu? Attach to certain objects, toys or places because they reminded you of video game levels? Did you write books, draw comics, et cetera? Did games give you weird ideas about how the world works? (What? You mean there are no turtles in the sewers?) If video games inspired your childhood play and lots of happy memories and silly stories, I need 'em.
Email leighalexander1 at gmail dot com with subject heading GAMING CHILDHOOD and share some of your memories, will you? Come on, I showed you my embarrassing emo Phantasy Star II novelization from third grade.
Even further, I'm interested in how those memories of play shape your relationship to games today. Are any console titles that launch today that immediately evoke young memories of playing previous installments Back In The Day? Learn anything about games or yourselves? Does your current station in life -- job, leisure time, relationship with kids -- have any relationship to the way you imagined play as a kid?
This is for an article, so if you write in, please include how you want to be cited. Responses from working game developers and journalists are especially welcome -- you can use your full name, part of it, your company name, your internet handle, or be wholly anonymous, really, whatever you'd like. Link this inquiry to your friends, reblog, retweet, whatever you like, spread the word!
Thank you as always for supporting the stuff I do, and hopefully you'll dig the result.
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9 comments:
I'm unfortunately drawing a blank :(. It wasn't later on that games affected my life, probably my freshmen year of highschool. When I think 'wee lad' I think 5 or so, meaning Super Mario World or something. However, I never really took those experiences out of the console. What a sad, sad child I was...
(or my memory is completely shot)
Just sent you an email.
I used to draw screenshots of fictional games I wish existed. This would have been in the heady days of the NES, so I'm guessing 22-23 years ago or so now. Man typing that out makes me feel old.
Re-effin sponded, with a lot of overblown selfconsciousness, which makes me even more selfconscious.
My recollections weren't even that good or funny to be worth the drama.
I guess it's just... nobody ever asked before. :-|
I played a lot of games as a kid, and while I tried to recreate a lot of actions and adventures I saw, I never really wanted to *be* the protagonists. I'd go looking for treasures to bring back home (like in Zork), or swordfight like in Defender of the Crown, or jump from narrow rock to narrow curb like every platformer ever - for some reason, I was convinced that the landscape Super Mario Brothers was all very narrow platforms, and that Mario would fall if he walked closer or further from the camera.
But even though I tried to recreate the actions, I always kept my own characters for the stories in my head. I blame (or rather, thank) my early involvement with D&D and other tabletop RPGs, which let me make epic stories for characters of my own creation. I never pretended to be Mario or Kid Icarus, but I sure pretended to be Qwandrik Martag, 20th-level Wizard.
It is interesting you ask about childhood. I remember pretending I was a musketeer, a knight of King Arthurs, and jumping into the imaginary "rabbit hole" of my little sister's fantasy land. I remember playing video games, me and 2 friends used to play Mario Party every day after school, but we never pretended the games were real.
Thinking about it I find myself amused at the fact that instead of during my childhood, Freshmen year of College a group of my friends all got a few bamboo pools, some practice swords, and went to the park to practice Soul Caliber II moves.
Sophmore year, a couple hundred students all got together and had a massive war battle with cardboard armor and weapons.
Senior year, I got to pretend I was a assassin type character challenging people for their ID badges in a collection game.
And ever since Katamari Damacy came out, any time I go in a plane I look out the window and think about how I would roll up all the buildings and vehicles below.
I find myself back in a childhood of sorts creating games of make-believe, that I for some reason never thought of when I was little.
Perhaps my clearest early memory of videogame-related play, I recall emulating the original arcade game Dragon's Lair. We had wild celery growing in the ditch near our house in Minnesota. In the fall it dries out but the stalks remain erect. I cut a path through the stalks with a makeshift stick "sword," pretending I was Dirk Daring cutting down those goblins to get to the Princess Daphne.
I wish more than anything that I never lost my second- and third-grade journals full of my own "Extended Universe" Mega Man X fiction and comics.
Anyway, yes, I have a childhood full of videogames to thank for everything from my imagination and creativity to my frugality, efficiency, personal determination, information processing, and probably anything else in my wide worldview.
I won't be computerbound much at all this week, but I'll try to send off something awesome if I can!
To this day, my best friend maintains that when we first met (in kindergarten), I was stomping on a sewer grate in the playground. When he asked me what I was doing, I explained that I was "jumping on Bowser's head."
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