Playing Video Games with My Son Isn’t What I Thought It Would Be

I recently had the pleasure of reviving a game world my brother & I had built three years ago. Wandering around that was a nice trip through nostalgia. These kids will be able to do that for their ten year old selves, all the way up.

If only all kids were so innocent. Maybe he's just young. It'd be mildly amusing to read this from the perspective of a parent horrified that their son developed into one of those raging lunatics that occasionally haunt Dota 2.

When I was about 14 or so, I used to play this oldschool game called Underlight. It was a roleplaying game unlike any other, before or since: You're forced to play a character. You're not allowed to talk about real life or even admit that real life exists at all.

It was so cool, mostly because this was the world of adults. This was also before the era of voice chat, so they had no clue I was 14.

It was also around that time that I was discovering myself, and it usually took the form of various relationships with various women. These relationships could feel quite real, though it was solely a text-based medium. And "sex" was obviously involved, or as close to it as you can get. (On the forums it was called "Quality Roleplaying," or QRP, hah.)

That was a very small component of the game, but it was there. The point was that it emulated real life in a few ways. There were politics. There were 8 "houses" (basically clans), with various leaders. I even participated in a murder once, an extremely rare event in any game. It was true murder, in a sense, because you're not allowed to log in to your character after that, and only a select few people ever had the ability. It cost 10 points of health permanently. It was basically the world of Harry Potter, and I was in Slytherin. So we had certain abilities that no one knew existed, one of which was the ability to end other characters. As far as I know, this ability was used only three times in the history of the game, so it was quite lucky to see it firsthand.

My dad once came down and sat behind me, perhaps out of curiosity. Unfortunately this was right in the middle of one of the QRP sessions. I spent about 20 minutes doing nothing but staring at the screen and frantically clearing the text whenever she said anything. He never understood what was going on. Eventually he got bored and left, and I was able to pick up right where we left off. Quite hilarious in retrospect. He never bothered to try to understand what I spent so much time doing, and I certainly never offered any info.

Video games are an increasingly important component of childrens' habits, and we shouldn't be quick to dismiss or trivialize their positive effects. I wasn't so good at writing until a few years of being forced to be.

People should not forget to take pictures and movies and make them physical, instead of dumping it on the internet. Having a small amount of pictures is more than enough, that make those events even more special.

I had a lot of gaming memories saved on Xfire. They stopped their service a couple years ago and all the contents and thus the strong link to memories are gone. Just like people you have had contact with online, eventually you'll loose contact and then these pictures can help you not forgetting that time...

Maybe we are making and processing so many events, that we'll get issues remembering stuff in a couple years?