How did you know you were a gamer?

Vermillion_Raventhal · October 2016

I remember playing Adventure on my big bro's Atari 2600 I had the brightest and most vivid dreams about the dragons in western dragon style flying outside my window. I think that was my first gaming obsession and that was prior to elementary lol

waynejr2 · October 2016

Well, back in the 70s we didn't call ourselves gamers. We were nerds who played board/war/roleplaying/video games.

Scorchien · October 2016

In the early mid 70s , with Pinball , then the arcades took off a bit later with Space invaders etc... Soo many quarters..:)

But when my interest reallly peeked in 77 was when i found a hex game based on LOTR, very very deep complex hex it seemed at the time was 10 or 11 years old , but man did it immerse me , after having read the books , this was glorious , Moving all the various heroes and troops around a giant hex based map of Middle Earth..

The in the early 80s the C64 and that was the it , when i could hook up my Quantum -Link and do text muds with people from all over ... was incredible , have never looked backed , and have enjoyed every minute , also became very lucrative as i started investing in Devs ,Publishers , Magazines thru the late 80s into and thru the 90s to current .. Gaming has had a very profound effect on my life and im glad it found me ..

KyutaSyuko · October 2016

I knew I was a gamer when I came out of the womb with a controller in my hands...

Octagon7711 · October 2016

I started with buying kits at Radio Shack, then got serious when I ordered a Commodore Amiga 1000, never lived without a good collect of games, computer, or computers since.

sunandshadow · October 2016

I'd been playing games for almost 10 years before it occurred to me to categorize myself as a gamer.

Same reason as Waynejr2, only a decade later. But my first exposure to video games was in elementary school; the school had a library room, and in addition to the books there were maybe 8 apple IIs and a milk crate full of manila folders with floppy disks in them. An hour of play time in this edutainment room was a common reward for scoring perfect on a math test or that sort of thing. My dad also thought technology was cool, and when he heard me enthusing about playing games at school he got me a handheld space invaders game, which I would always take with me when we were going somewhere in the car. Then maybe a year later we got an atari, and maybe a year or 2 after that our own apple 2 gs, which had some actual word processor software that my dad used, as well as games, and at some point we got a NES...

xpowderx · October 2016

It started the one time I turned down a date with a pretty girl. Just to go play D&D with my nerdy friends(Did not think I was a nerd at the time)~~WTH~~~~!!!!!!! I was 12 though. Man, that was a mistake! Did not learn about my dads uh p..n mags under the bed til I was 14. To realize how big of a mistake that really was! By then I was already corrupted!

immodium · October 2016

I was 6/7 years old and remember my parents getting me a Sinclair Spectrum + 3 back in the late 80's.

They still blame themselves to this day for my unhealthy passion for gaming.

kitarad · October 2016

When I tried to pay people to play Monopoly and Scrabble with me.... yes that was me so desperate for people to play with.

cameltosis · October 2016

I started gaming when I was about 5 (~1990). My father at the time was a maths teacher at a private school and had been asked to start teaching computing. He asked for a PC to bring home so he could get up to date and so we got a Pentium 286 with Windows 3.1, Lemmings and a LotR game.

I consistently played games from then until now, but I didn't consider myself a gamer until LotRO came out.

Growing up, computer games were just one aspect of my life. My main hobbies were sailing and skateboarding, with biking, drinking, weed, clubs and pubs all in the mix too. I identified much more strongly with the metal / rock scene than I ever did with gaming. I would never consider myself a geek either so when I was young I used to avoid your typical geeks (who enjoyed the same games as me, but I didn't like spending time with them) and I also shunned the more mainstream casual gamers (the ones who play endless fifa and cod).

LotRO was the turning point.

The game came out towards the end of my degree, so friends were going out less so less clubbing and parties. I'd given up skateboarding. More than that, the LotRO community gave me a sense of belonging. My guild seemed to be full of friendly, intelligent and funny people. A few were geeks, a few were losers, but the vast majority were just people like me. We used to meet up once a year in London for drinking sessions and I actually met a previous girlfriend at one of those meetups.

From then on, I started closely following the industry. I do a lot of research, I get really excited about game mechanics, I visit lots of news sites. It became my main hobby for many years, primarily MMOs but other types of gaming too. I tried to break into the industry and got a temporary job working QA for a AAA studio.

But yeh, 2007 / LotRO was when I started identifying as a gamer, despite gaming for 17 years by that point. Gaming went from being a small hobby to being my main hobby.

Kyarra · October 2016

I have always been a tomboy, and used to always watch football every Sunday with my dad. That is when I got this as a present for Xmas one year:

Then my brother got an Atari 2600, and many hours of playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Combat, Asteroids etc. just sealed the deal of me being a total gamer girl nerd. Been playing them since I was 8. (I am old now :P)

LynxJSA · October 2016

Kyarra said:

I have always been a tomboy, and used to always watch football every Sunday with my dad. That is when I got this as a present for Xmas one year:
Then my brother got an Atari 2600, and many hours of playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Combat, Asteroids etc. just sealed the deal of me being a total gamer girl nerd. Been playing them since I was 8. (I am old now :P)

I was always jealous of the kids that had those. My Dad wanted to wait to see what other games came out rather than buy the first one despite Electronic Football being AWESOME. My first was Galaxian 2.

Image: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/qAMAAOSwEeFVAOlW/s-l640.jpg

xpowderx · October 2016

Kyarra said:

I have always been a tomboy, and used to always watch football every Sunday with my dad. That is when I got this as a present for Xmas one year:
Then my brother got an Atari 2600, and many hours of playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Combat, Asteroids etc. just sealed the deal of me being a total gamer girl nerd. Been playing them since I was 8. (I am old now :P)

shhhhhhhhh.... cant let these youngsters know there are us "old" people here!

CrazKanuk · October 2016

I think that I always enjoyed playing games, but the defining moment when I knew I was a gamer had to be lugging my desktop 3 miles in a duffel bag for LAN parties. Oh, and the fact that at no point did I question whether or not it was a good idea.

FlyByKnight · October 2016

I played a game a long time ago and I liked the game, so I started playing games.

Phaserlight · October 2016

Sometime in the early to mid '00s, I explained the term to my younger brother as 'someone who is good at games'. I identified with this when thinking back to my experiences in the 90's, and 80's; I began at age 4 in 1984 with the likes of The Ancient Art of War (one of the very first RTS games, introducing me to the design metaphor of rock-paper-scissors), Microsoft Flight Simulator (in which I learned to navigate by VOR), and later PT-109 (introducing me to the life of John F. Kennedy) and Crystal Quest (first time I used a level editor, recreating scenes from the Lord of the Rings books).

In the 00's, I realized I had the desire to be 'good' at games like these, to understand their mechanics and 'what made them tick'. Growing up I had also designed numerous dice-and-colored-pencils-on-a-sketchpad board games for which my brother and sisters became de facto beta testers. Some of them were quite elaborate, complete with card decks and asymmetrical competitive play.

...as such, I considered myself a 'gamer'.

Today, I'm not sure how I feel about the term:

http://www.polygon.com/2014/10/24/6984975/where-does-the-word-gamer-come-from

https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37#.wyt4ooaea

Kyleran · October 2016

Way back in my youth I was an avid board gamer. Starting with Life, Clue, Monopoly and Green Ghost I moved on to Risk, Stratego, Battleship and others.

I even played more eclectic titles such as Masterpiece and Broadside and when I got older Axis and Allies, Conquest of the Empire and Fortress America in the 80s.

Then came the TRS 80 and IBM PC in the late 80s and electronic games became my passion.

But the real question I ponder these days is when and why did I stop being a gamer?

I play EVE but have liitle interest in much else, on or offline and wonder if its possible to rekindle the magic?

Panther2103 · October 2016

I don't know if I ever called myself a gamer, I was more of a "nerd" I guess. I have been playing games since I was like 3 or 4, we moved a lot so I kinda stuck to playing games on every console since the NES.

pantheron · October 2016

at the time, I hardly ever played video games, just Mario bros, other platformers, stuff like that. when the PS1 came out, I asked for it because every other kid had one, and I wanted to be like them. I got demos a lot of the time, because I liked to try lots of games. I tried Final Fantasy 8's demo, and it changed my life.

I had never seen a game so beautiful, or so cinematic. It was rated T, which I wasn't allowed to play at the time, so it had this slightly "dangerous" feeling as well. I had also never played an RPG before, and the JRPG gameplay fit me like a glove. I was hooked.

100s of JRPGs, WRPGs, and MMOs later, I am still loving the genre. I met my Fiancee in Forsaken World, I have a complete JRPG collection for the Nintendo DS, and I still have that demo disk.

Konfess · October 2016

The year was 1975 and Burdines had on display / demo the first home edition of Pong. Up to that time all arcade games were mechanical. EIther Pinball or a mechanical shooting game like seen at carnivals.

waynejr2 · October 2016

Kyarra said:

I have always been a tomboy, and used to always watch football every Sunday with my dad. That is when I got this as a present for Xmas one year:
Then my brother got an Atari 2600, and many hours of playing Yars Revenge, Adventure, Combat, Asteroids etc. just sealed the deal of me being a total gamer girl nerd. Been playing them since I was 8. (I am old now :P)

I remember when this came out. You could hear the sounds of dozens of people playing them all at the same time. haha.

waynejr2 · October 2016

Konfess said:

The year was 1975 and Burdines had on display / demo the first home edition of Pong. Up to that time all arcade games were mechanical. EIther Pinball or a mechanical shooting game like seen at carnivals.

What about the Magnavox Oddyssey home video console back in 72? It had pong.

Sovrath · October 2016

Phaserlight said:

Today, I'm not sure how I feel about the term:

For me it has a negative connotation. By various examples I probably am a gamer but I don't really consider myself a gamer nor would I ever tell anyone I was a gamer.

Kyleran · October 2016

waynejr2 said:

Konfess said:

The year was 1975 and Burdines had on display / demo the first home edition of Pong. Up to that time all arcade games were mechanical. EIther Pinball or a mechanical shooting game like seen at carnivals.

What about the Magnavox Oddyssey home video console back in 72? It had pong.

Actually it had a ping pong like game which helped spawn "Pong" which was a trademarked arcade game/ name exclusive to Atari and released in Nov 1972

Pong appears to have been significantly more complex than it's early predecessor .

GladDog · October 2016

My dad bought a Pong game in the early 70s, and that was the one thing that my step brothers and I agreed to with a vengeance! We had a blast playing that! That just whetted my appetite though. The thing that hooked me was PnP DnD and Gamma World. And then I met a guy who had a shiny new TRS80 that he was playing Jovian Wars on, and that was the BIG HOOK for me! Two color, probably 4 bit resolution, and I could not get enough of it. After that I knew I was a gamer through and through...

Eldurian · October 2016

My father is a computer programmer so we've had computers around the house my entire life. He would hand down his old computers to my mom, who would hand them down to my older brother, who would hand them down to me. So while they were always a bit older I've had my own computer for a long time.

There was no real moment I "knew" I was a gamer. I was playing games like Commander Keen and Super Mario Bros. as far back as I can remember.

One big turning point is when we bought an N64 around 2nd or 3rd grade though. That was really when I went from being a regular kid who plays games to a kid who was playing games as much as I could get away with.

The next big transition was when I tried Age of Empires II online in 5th grade, back in the days we still had dial up. That was my intro into online gaming and clans as we called them back then.

The biggest transition was Freelancer in freshman year. I started leading clans a couple years early but they were exceptionally casual. In Freelancer I fought my first clan wars. It started an addiction to Open World PvP that has lasted from that point on.

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"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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How did you know you were a gamer?

Comments

"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!