How Video Games Have Changed My Life

Video games are often attacked in the media and by parents in general as a waste of time. My life thus far proves that they aren’t always. Nearly all of my interests were derived from video games at some level, as my obsession with a current video game always tags the obsession on to another subject. This makes me want to learn about the subject matter, and I delve deeper, turning me into the nerd I am today. This is the story of how video games have influenced my life.

As a young child, I was already hooked on video games. I played with my father’s Atari with his hundreds of short, but all almost eternally satisfying games. After playing Q-Bert one too many times, I came upon the Super Nintendo. On that system came the video game that changed my life more than any other: Super Mario RPG (for those who don’t play video games or who aren’t nerds in general, RPG stands for role-playing game). I loved playing the game, but there were no voiceovers, and I couldn’t yet read. Therefore, I depended on my parents or babysitter to read the words to me, allowing me to associate those strange symbols at the bottom of the screen with real words. Super Mario taught me how to read much more thoroughly than Go, Dog, Go! or Hop on Pop.

Another, slightly less useful byproduct of playing the game is my undying obsession with Italy. The character Mario is meant to be an Italian plumber, so that’s exactly what I wanted to be. In kindergarten, when others would time and again ask me “What do you want to grow up to be?” I’d reply, as though there were nothing wrong with it, “an Italian plumber.” I hardly noticed the strange responses others would give after an answer like that, but only took pride when they sometimes said, “Well, I suppose plumbers do make a lot of money.” Of course, at the time I thought Italian could be part of your profession, and that plumbers really just saved princesses and jumped on goombas. I am uncertain when I found out just what plumbers did, but it must have been a rather dark day for me.

I was always considered “the smart one” in school, and part of the reason must have been the interesting topics video games introduced me to. At some point growing up, I had a strange impulse to buy the computer games Medieval: Total War and Civilization III. These two games made history my favorite subject in school for years and years, because I could always count on outside information for class. I knew, (and still know), more about Italian history than anybody else in my school, town, and possibly even state through playing the games then reading books about the subjects in those games I found interesting. I had never heard of the Byzantines before Medieval: Total War, so I picked up John Julius Norwich’s A Short History of Byzantium to find out just who they were and their entire thousand year history. Reading his very entertaining history book made me want to read more of his books, so I read extensively about the Most Serene Republic of Venice as well. In this way, a great chain of learning evolved all from playing the computer game. This sort of thing happens all the time in my life.

For instance, there is an even more convoluted path that led me to writing.com. It began with the Playstation 3 game, Skate. No, seriously, it started with a skateboarding video game. After playing and really enjoying the game for a while, I looked online for some walkthroughs, just curious to see if one had been written up to that point. None had, and the site was even offering a $60 Amazon.com gift certificate to the first person to write a complete guide to the game. I had some free time and loved playing through the game, so I was on the task. After many, many hours playing the game and documenting everything I did on a laptop next to me on my bed, the walkthrough was finished and uploaded. The immense gratification from getting one thousand views a day of my work (the money was nice, too) inspired me to find other places to write online and show off what I can do. It was in this search that I found writing.com and starting writing short stories.

Because of all this, I cannot find sympathy for parents who completely forbid the playing of video games in their household. Yes, it’s a drain on money, and yes, some of them won’t really inspire anything in their child besides more mindless video game playing. However, if a parent has the time to look at video games and find which are pointless and which could be great for a smart kid, it could be really helpful for their children’s development. I’m not going to suggest that parents harass kids about the games they buy, and I hope that the kids can get a few mindless ones every now and then, too, but nothing is better for learning geography than a strategic warfare game. Never again will the kid mistake Europe for a country if they are commanding the French defense against the German blitzkrieg. And hopefully they’ll read a book about exactly what happened afterwards to benefit off of their excitement for the game.

I just wanted to donate my life story to defend video games against the generally bad reputation they receive. It’s an entertainment industry, and entertainment gets bad press all the time anyway. My childhood obsession with video games has influenced me to learn more than any teacher I’ve ever had, even if it gave me a few quirks, like the interest in Italy and the color red from Mario. Let children play video games at least a little bit, and maybe they’ll learn something while they’re being entertained.