A personal narrative on my experiences with video games? Ok. Well, how long does it have to be? I hate sounding like a sophomore in high school avoiding a book report, but video games? What do I know about video games? No really—what do I know about video games? I know some gamers; maybe I could just write about them. No, one should never lie in a personal narrative, especially if it’s going to be put on the Internet with a name on it!

When I reflect on my experiences with video games a few very short memories come to mind. I remember when my dad brought home the Nintendo, a square grey box with red buttons, if memory serves, two controllers, a sleek plastic gun, and a cartridge. Yep, one lone cartridge complete with both the original Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. To me, the Stredder family had just jumped light years into the technological age. At the time we still had (and used) our Beta VCR, and suddenly my dad was bringing home a Nintendo that a lot of people didn’t have yet. Go figure. My dad went through the usual motions of setting up any new piece of electronic equipment: find the instructions, lose the instructions, unwrap and tear the tags off everything, ignore all diagrams on the box, throw away all piece-identifying labels, plug in, unplug, and re-plug in everything at least three times. After a plethora of expletives and what seemed like hours, the Stredder family was little more than a bunch of red, sweaty faces and anti-technology sentiment. It shouldn’t have been that difficult, but remember the Beta—we were not a technologically savvy group of people. I’m pretty sure we didn’t get rid of that Beta until I was nearly in high school because we were all too scared of trying to figure out how to set the clock on a new VHS.

I was the youngest in my gigantic family of four, and because I was the baby and the girl, I spent most of that first day kneeling behind my dad and brother watching and giggling as their bodies leaned back and forth, their arms waving around in futile attempts to manipulate Mario and Luigi as if the hand-held controllers just weren’t doing the job right.

At first, I wasn’t allowed to play the Nintendo without adult supervision—I might break it. Yeah, maybe if I threw it out the front room window or used it as a trampoline I might break it, but I had to have adult supervision nonetheless. Over the course of a few months I spent many hours quietly sitting inches away from our huge console TV (yep, we still had a console TV) making Luigi jump over stuff and collect coins—I always chose Luigi because he wore green and that was my favorite color. When I wasn’t mesmerized by Super Mario Bros., I spent a few afternoons shooting little animated ducks out of the sky with the long-barreled plastic hand gun. I guess Duck Hunt was really my first experience with a first-person shooter. No, it didn’t make me violent or anything, well except for when I missed the ducks and that damn dog would come popping out of the bushes to laugh at me. I tried to shoot him, but it never worked.

Eventually, those first games lost their appeal, probably because it was the only cartridge we had for months, but my dad came home one afternoon with three new games: a baseball game, a Mike Tyson boxing game, and the MTV Remote Control game. Because I think baseball is the most boring game ever created and I pretty much sucked at the Mike Tyson game, the only time I touched the Nintendo was to play Remote Control. Do you remember that show? It was the first game show on MTV and was on the air for about ten minutes, but I loved it anyway. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV, and the game was as close to the real thing as I could get. In fact, I played the game so often that before the year was out, I had every question memorized and could accurately predict which question would be asked and in what order.

I was never really engaged with any of the games, though. I never cared about the process or journey of the games—there wasn’t one really. I cared about getting to the last screen when the lights flashed and the screen announced that I was the winner. Woohoo, right? When it was over, I turned off the TV and found more entertaining things to do with my precious adolescent time. This lack of video game enthusiasm combined with the Stredder’s limited technology experience has made me the video game newbie that I am today. While I was playing my clarinet in the band, babysitting kids around the neighborhood, and reading all the books I could get my hands on, apparently, the video game world was making some amazing progress. Who’d ‘a thought? In junior high, I was too busy "hangin’ at the mall" and being a huge New Kids on the Block fan to occupy myself with meaningless video games, which seems incredibly ironic now.

As a high school student, I remember strolling through aisles at ShopKo and even walking by the video game displays at Sears thinking that video games were nothing more than a waste of time. It was easy for me to pass judgment on all video games. The Nintendo had been packed into the hall closet for years and we didn’t get a real computer until I was a sophomore; all word processing needs in our house were completed using our Brother Word Processor (add that to the list of embarrassing electronics with the Beta and console TV). My best friend’s parents were more into video games than I was. I’d go to their house to do whatever it was I did when I was in high school, and her parents would be huddled on the floor playing their Sega, the sounds of gunshots and small explosions filling the living room. I remember thinking that all the gratuitous violence was really sending the wrong message to my friend’s little brothers—how moral majority can I be?!

A year or two after getting our computer, my mom and I decided that for my dad’s birthday, we would get him a game. So we took ourselves down to the Barnes and Noble (of course we went to a bookstore to buy a video game) and stared at the multitude of options available on the neat oak shelves. How did we choose? I thought the cover was cool. Yep, we picked up and paid for The 7^th Guest because I thought it looked cool. After installing the game on my dad’s birthday (see Nintendo description above), the time spent playing it became what I remember fondly as bonding time between me and my dad. In the couple of hours after work and school and before dinner, my dad and I would sit in the den playing through puzzles and exploring Stauf’s haunted mansion. Our interest in the game didn’t last long enough to even get completely through it, but the time was valuable nonetheless.

This sudden spurt of video game enthusiasm inspired by The 7^th Guest fizzled out as quickly as it developed. There was always something more pressing to do than play video games, and even more importantly, video games were expensive and didn’t fit well into the family budget. I went off to college, and it never occurred to me to spend my time on video games. My parents decided that since they spent all their time at work looking at computers, the last thing they wanted to do in their recreation time was stare at another monitor, so they bought a Harley and reserved the computer for more professional tasks. That pretty much brings us up to date; I was perfectly content to disregard video games altogether—then someone asked me to write a personal narrative about my video game experiences.