The Birth of a Gamer

I started playing games when I was three years old. My father’s Sega Genesis was my first glimpse into other digital worlds, and my first companion was True Blue himself, Sonic the Hedgehog in Green Hill Zone. The music and sounds will always evoke nostalgia for me that many people older than me were familiar with when the console released ten years before I got my start gaming.

While Sonic was always one of my favorites, I was soon introduced to the Xbox, and then three years later the Xbox 360. I grew up playing Halo and Call of Duty, I journeyed through Cyrodiil in Oblivion, and wasted hours on indie games like Marble Blast Ultra and RoboBlitz. Mass Effect 3 launched on my birthday, and it was an interesting present, but one I would cherish, as it showed me an entirely new side of gaming. Once I replayed the trilogy, I understood what it meant to tell a story through a video game.

Thinking back to the earliest encounters though, I always appreciated the storytelling in games. While Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was by no means an award winning plot, it took the idea of a movie’s plot and put me into it. Showed me a new perspective. Its followup, World at War, told the story of soldiers fighting in the most gruesome war ever faced, refusing to shy away from the horrors of that war. It evoked an emotional response even while being fairly cookie cutter.

Then Mass Effect came along, and told a story of, across a trilogy, a character you got to choose the personality of. The emotional attachment to the characters and reacting to each event became just as important as shooting Cerberus and Reaper troops. The decision to sacrifice the Geth or the Quarians in the third game was a tough decision, because both sides did awful things in their conflicts. Upon finding out that there was a specific series of circumstances that allowed both to survive if the right choices were made across the trilogy, I replayed it, intending on doing some things different.

I didn’t though. Almost every choice, every dialogue option, every quest ending I chose was the exact same. And that continues to my playthroughs currently. Despite knowing how each event will unfold, the emotions generated by each run reminds me of that first time. I could never shoot someone for the sake of the mission, I could never deny a race their chance at survival just because of what they might do after the war was over.

That’s the beauty of video games as literature. Even knowing every step the next time you play a game, making the same choices because of how strong our emotions are towards that game. And, if I could feel that even in a cookie cutter shooter plot, and most definitely in Mass Effect, why shouldn’t video games count as a form of literature?