Era 0: Wisps (video game resumé)
I want to write about video games on this blog. Which for now, means I want to write about the history of my video game experiences…
I played very few video games in my early childhood. When you’re that young, memories are foggy, and you’re a completely different person. But I vaguely remember being generally uninterested in video games for a combination of reasons.
My parents wouldn’t buy the necessary hardware. Few of my friends played them. On top of that, I had plenty of other things I enjoyed, like playing baseball and arguing with my friends over who got to play which position, fantasizing about hitting game winning shots on my backyard basketball hoop, and reading enough books to complete the Local Library Challenge.
That said, I do have several vivid memories of video games in my early childhood.
One time at a sleepover with a friend, we stayed up literally all night playing The Incredibles on Game Boy Advance. (Believe it or not, gameboys didn’t used to have backlights, so we laid for hours on the hardwood floor next to the night light.) We didn’t stop til my friend’s dad yelled at us as he was leaving for work, but boy was that a great memory.
Even earlier than that, I played this random Bill Nye science game on PC. I was captivated by the story: you had to save the world from an asteroid called “Impending Dumé” by answering these silly riddles from a super powerful computer called MAAX. While the gameplay was fun, ultimately I didn’t play much because I was too impatient to do all the necessary wandering to discover clues.
I dabbled in a few other PC games (Pinball, Monster’s Inc Eight Ball Chaos, Spider Solitaire). But the video game that I spent the most time on during early childhood was unequivocally Backyard Baseball on PC.
I was the sort of kid who read the sports page every morning to check box scores, spent birthday money on baseball cards, and could tell you the exact number of wins, losses, and games behind for every team in the NL West on any given day.
So it’s no surprise that I LOVED Backyard Baseball. When it was my turn to use the family PC, you already know which CD-ROM I’m putting in.
I loved building a team, playing a whole league with them, then iterating on my roster. Pablo Sanchez was the absolute GOAT and the Aluminum Power Bat was unnecessarily overpowered.
I was pretty self aware as a little kid, so even at the time, I realized I was missing out on a lot of social opportunities and playground conversations since I didn’t have a Dreamcast or N64. If I ended up at a friend’s house with a console, I rarely wanted to play. Since everyone else would be so much better than me, it wasn’t really that fun.
These sorts of situations overlapped with my experiences with being bullied as a young kid. Less because of the objective reality that I was Bad At Video Games, but more for being an Outsider and an easy target for others to Gang Up On. But in general, my inexperience at video games wasn’t that big of a deal.
In retrospect, I’m pretty content with my video game experiences from early childhood. Even though I missed out on a lot of fun, I’m pretty happy with all the other stuff I got to do as a kid. I’m also very glad I got to play a non-zero amount of video games, because IMO getting lost in a flow state is one of the best parts of the human experience, and playing video games are one of the easiest ways to do that.
Stay tuned for the next installment in my video game resume… Era 1: Xbox.