Why Games are Important to Me

I’m sure that I was not the only kid who used the fantasy worlds of Hyrule, Albion, or Mushroom kingdom, to escape a harsher reality than a kid can process. In a lot of ways, the only way a 12 year old can claim any agency over his/her own life, is in games, and for a bullied and abused kid, that self determination in a world where you can fight back and win is a siren song. My young mind latched onto that escape in the same way it latched onto the escape of fantasy novels, where the hero almost always wins, and magic is real. So, in a very real way, video games helped to carry me through the challenges of my early life. For those reasons and more, I treat the importance of video games as a serious topic of discussion. After all, they might have saved my life a few times.

As most of you reading this probably did, I picked up the gaming lifestyle at a relatively young age. My first game was Age of Empires 2, and let me tell you what; I wouldn’t choose a different game in a million years. I could sit here and write out a million reasons why I love that game, but that’s not what this article is about. It’s about why games are important to me, not which.

Beyond just my childhood experiences and obsessions, as an adult I have come to realize the full gravity of the medium. Not only did games like Fallout 3 and Borderlands help me through my time in the military, but they taught me things. The type of games I spend my time on might have changed over time, although I still go back and play Age of Empires online with some of my childhood friends once in a while, despite thousands of miles and nearly a decade apart.(Remind me to talk about how amazing the internet is sometime.) But the importance of what I glean from the experiences does not change. I believe that games, not just video games, are important to the human experience. After all, games have been a part of how human beings relate to the world around them since the dawn of time.

Play is how cavemen formed bonds, it's how we all learned to experience the world around us as children, and it's the single biggest thing that brings humans together(Olympics/FIFA/ESports). Most salient to this discussion, I find that video games, specifically role-playing or adventure, afford us all the opportunity to, at least in a small part, experience life in somebody else's shoes. I would never pretend that the experience is equivalent, but for somebody who has never personally been victimized by sexism, racism, or any of the isms, it can be transformative to witness even a little bit of the experiences that shape how others live. Games give us that special opportunity to break into how others see the world and learn empathy; They allow us to better understand each other in a more meaningful way, and to come together in saying, "We aren't so different, after all."