Thursday, June 7, 2012

Tales from the average girl gamer

   
   Games were always kind of my thing growing up. Whether they were just a simple game of Simon says or  playing the nice car game called the quiet game. I excelled in that game. But then when I was about the age of six I was introduced to video games. My friend and neighbor, Jonah, had a play station, a gamecube, and what seemed to be a trillion videos games to choose from (it really was only about 5 or 7 games). But he never let me play a game of Spyro the dragon with him or any other game for that matter. All I could do was watch him play. And for a six year old, participation in games and other means of entertainment is practically a must. But I did eventually convince Jonah to let me play with his Pokemon collectible figures while I watched. He moved when I was seven with all of his video games galore. I only had brief, almost fleeting, experiences with a few video games. I even got to try playing the play station 2 once, even if only for five minutes. But I had no idea what I was doing or what button I was pressing.
    Around four years later when I was ten, a new game console was released. It was constantly sold out in every store in America. It was all the rage. You couldn't escape without seeing an advertisement for it somewhere. I'll give you a hint. The commercial for it consisted of two japanese business men in a smart car coming up to different people's doors and saying, "Wii would like to play." If you haven't guessed already, I apologize for the sheltered life you had for pop culture. It's the Wii. My dad was able to get one of the Wii's around christmas time. Nowadays, no one really plays the Wii and feels truly happy about it as much. The Wii was the only console I had at that time and it was the funnest thing I knew. Or at least until I became interested in the Xbox360.
    When I was twelve, one of my friends had an Xbox360. Me and my other friend would hang out and play Call of Duty 3 with him. I know, it's not the newest game in the world. Hell, even back then it wasn't. But it was new to me. The thing was, I never played the Xbox before so I had no idea which buttons did what. After the fifth day and I was still getting beat by 350 to 0, they decided to call it a truce. We would play multiplayer still, but we never took anything seriously. We would drive the jeeps in the game and take it over a broken bridge and see who could shoot us down from the other side. Other times we were just goofing off. But one day when we were playing team deathmatch and I was re-spawning as many times as you could blink, one of my friends said, "This is what I mean, why do all girls suck at video games?"
   I felt stereotyped right then and there. It wasn't because I sucked at the game, I knew that I sucked, it was because he was dragging at least 40% of all gamers that happened to be girls down with me. The reason why I did suck was not because I was a girl, it was because back when I was growing up my parents couldn't afford to buy me a video game console. While those guys were busy melting their brains and staring at the screen so long they could only see the color yellow, I was outside using the power of imagination for my own personal entertainment. But I let the horrid insult slide. And then on my birthday, I found a surprise awaiting me. My parents had gotten an Xbox360. My first Xbox game was Left 4 Dead 2. 
   Now two years have passed and me and my brother have our own collection of video games. My brother only has most of the call of duty series, but I have the better games. Skyrim, Portal, Portal 2, Left 4 dead, Half life, Half life 2, Team Fortress, etc. I will admit that I am a sucker for Valve's works, even if they don't know how to count to three. So I shall wrap this up because I'm actually going to play Minecraft right now. So for all you gamers, go and follow your dreams, kill zombies, escape evil computers, beat up ninjas, and do other gamer thingies. :3

1 comment:

  1. Don't worry most guys suck at video games too. =p They just don't realize it from their point of view.

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