Why I Play Video Games

I remember going to arcades when I was a kid and pumping quarters into the various cabinets and living my best life. Asteroids, Defender, Galaga, Pac Man, Star Wars, and Zaxxon were my personal favorites. I would go to the local Woolworth’s at my local mall and pine for the Atari 2600 and one game, Pole Position.

In 1987 we would get our first game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System. In one day my life was changed forever. The first games in our collection were Karate Champ, Ring King, Super Mario Bros, and Top Gun. Not long after I bought Mike Tyson’s Punch Out and The Legend of Zelda and a life time hobby was launched.

In the beginning, I played video games because they were a lot of fun, they were new, and it gave me a group of friends where I could be myself. We could talk about our favorite games, speculate what the next big game release was going to be, and discuss what our perfect game would be. We were the board game generation, we grew up on Monopoly, Risk, and Stratego. Dungeons & Dragons was the go to game for our imaginations. There was no internet, no Kotaku, no IGN.

Video games were coming into their own and kicking in the doors of our homes.

Hobby: My enjoyment of video games has grown over the past four decades from childish entertainment to the full blown hobby of collecting video games. My collection is modest – 15 game systems give or take, and around 600 games, but I’m still proud of it. My gear is in excellent condition and most of my games are complete in box. I love going on game crawls with my son and my friends. We try to go once per year, although COVID put a damper on it the last couple of years. Our crawls consist of hitting various used game stores and scavenging for different games and accessories to round out our collections, lunch, a visit to a hobby shop, and of course, ice cream.

Distraction: Throughout my life video games have been a form of escape for me. Although I wasn’t formally diagnosed with a Generalized Anxiety Order and Depression until 2008, I always knew there was something going on under the hood with me. Video games let me escape my life for a few hours, the endless chore of acting normal, fitting in, and suppressing both tremendous rage and a secret desire to end it all. Playing a few games of Tecmo Bowl, scooting around Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda, or destroying Glass Joe for the thousandth time in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out let me ignore my reality for awhile, at least long enough to let my troublesome thoughts pass. Video games along with my family and hospitalization kept me going when I didn’t want to go on.

Entertainment More than anything, when I play a video game, I want to be entertained, I want an experience that I will remember, and I want bragging rights. One of my favorite things is getting the Xbox Achievements or PlayStation Trophies for completing different tasks in the games I play. I find it so gratifying when the Achievement Chime plays and the little animation appears on the screen letting me know I completed the feat needed to earn the achievement or trophy. It may seem silly to get excited over something that is so Pavlovian, but I love each achievement I earn.

Conclusion: Video games serve a number of different roles in my life – coping mechanism, hobby, and participatory entertainment. Since my first game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) back in 1987, video games have been a fixture, my go to happy place when I had no other place to go. I love video games, I love to play video games, and video games are a part of my identity. I’m proud they are one of the things I’ve held onto all these years.