My father plays video games. For that matter, so does my mother. They have for as long as I can remember. And consequently, so have I. The first was duck hunt, which I still have nightmares about to this day. I have forgotten the terror of Jurassic Park but I still cannot get over that damn dog. I was a strange child, really. Then came gameboys, and pokemon. Then the N64, wonder of wonders, master of my childhood.
I never stopped. Never grew out of them. And why should I have? While I played Majora's Mask, or later on, Wind Waker, my father was raiding dragons in Vellious. When WoW came out, we all rolled horde characters together, to play as a family. Civilization, Skyrim and Dragon Age went through our family like infections; one of us would play, and the others would slowly pick it up for themselves to do likewise.
My father's first character, and for the longest time, his main character in Everquest was not Toldain. It was Aquino, Slayer of Puppies, and he came from tabletop, upon which my sister and I were raised with a steady diet of games and stories. My tabletop characters have a way of finding their ways into MMO characters; and worse (better?) yet, my MMO characters have a way of finding themselves in tabletop, or in writing, or in doodles in the margins of the sketchbook I was meant to be doing homework in.
I've played across a spectrum of kinds of games-my friends have dragged me into Persona 4 Arena, which is a different breed of fighting game than Super Smash Brothers, which was different from Soul Caliber. Rune Factory and Harvest Moon sit alongside Skyrim and Dragon Age II, which are across from a stack of the sims and my cases of DS and 3DS games, with Pokemon Black and White slotted across from Devil Survivor 1 and 2.
My father started a blog years ago, before I left truly for college, before I wandered off into the wilderness that is San Francisco, to find that art students have red bull and tea instead of blood in their veins. I thought it was a dumb idea. I thought it was a silly idea. I worried he didn't know the internet well enough to know what he was opening himself up to.
I thought "Well, if he's having fun, why the hell not?"
I got a Google+ a year ago. It remained mostly untouched until I got Guild Wars 2. Now the only updates between my homework assignments are about our guild's tours across Tyria, meeting new and interesting monsters to murder in mass numbers.
I got asked if he could quote a post in his blog. My phone rebelled telling him sure whatever. I went and looked up the blog later. I still thought it was kind of dorky. There was a 'create journal' button over in the top corner.
Being dorky or dumb didn't mean I was immune, clearly.
