The goal of this post is to briefly share my early gaming experiences to provide context and perspective on why I've engaged with this hobby mostly by myself for reference and possible future publications on this site.

On a side note: this is also a test of my setup and test drive of this publishing platform.

Road of self improvement

Don't look to others for knowledge. This is your story. -- Auron, Final Fantasy X

Most of my early gaming can be described as me sitting alone in a room playing my dad's NES/SNES collection as he left it before retiring from the hobby. Apart from rentals, I tended to play and replay the same games from said collection (and sometimes my uncle's collection). I seldom got access to new games during this era, so this meant that most of my gaming time was "perfecting the craft" of the games I access to. Each session I figured that I could always improve a score, use another upgrade path, a different difficulty, or beating a game before it got dark. Last I remember I produced around 4 full notebooks with notes, codes/passwords I brute forced, and secondhand tips. In the end, it was about finding ways to enjoy the very diverse but unchanging collection I had. It was not in a min-max kind of way, at least not yet, but more of a "is playing like this fun for me" way.

The topic never came in early elementary school circles until the N64 and PS1 came out. Sadly for me, my parents never got me either. While friends were talking about the Mario 64s, Ocarina of Times, and Crash Bandicoots, I was still using my previously mentioned collection. My only engagement with the N64 was using my uncle's, which I had to share with him AND my grandma like once every other weekend. The very little PS1 time was from a buddy that had moved but came to visit once a year during the summer. For the PS2, I got it for the holidays 3-4 years into it's lifecycle and I mostly played the launch/early games because they were super cheap, and wait that good ol' Greatest Hits reprint at the store. Playing older generations until I could get in late to the current one would become the theme until later adulthood.

These circumstances meant that I was engaging and experiencing phases way after people had moved on and mentioning it in public meant that I would get information dumped about how THEY experienced it or how it MUST be experienced for some arbitrary reason.

"Why are you using the hammer? Just use stealth with a dagger.".

"Did you tell him about the greatsword bug? Dude, just use the greatsword you can get by bugging out the early map and one-shot every mob!"

"Bro, you want the code for unlimited ammo and health?"

"Dude, what are you talking about? Rinoa? That's Tifa!" - Classmate pointing at Rinoa

Interactions like the ones above are ones I didn't enjoy. Little me was naive thinking that people would engage with their games (at full price, by the way) the way I did my old ones. What I saw instead, were people "crossing their Ts and dotting their Is". They played but didn't remember important story beats, general gameplay systems, personal strategies, or music tracks. The highlight was simple stuff like a boss they considered hard but didn't remember why, the hard dungeon because anything before it was relatively on rails, and "FOR THE LOVE OF YOUR GOD IT'S BEEN 9 YEARS! GET OVER THIS!".

Over time I've wondered how or why I view this hobby so differently than most of my peers. I've focus this on my engagement and personal experiences with other people in this hobby. Over the years, my now-obvious-to-me conclusion is that for me gaming has been all about these artistic manifestations of design that make one engage with systems, the personal expression that came from this engagement, and the process that got you there. The level of complexity is not relevant, from simple systems found in platformers and most AAA games these days, to more complex systems in Massive Multiplayer Online Games, strategy games, and automation games.

Obviously, this has always been a very niche way of approaching this hobby, especially in an age where it has become an extremely popular and social activity, but also the reason why I find it hard to share my experiences with it. There are some positives to this, like being more socially acceptable and tolerable, but there are a lot of negatives that I feel are affecting how games are developed, shaping the discourse in social media, and how people engage with the medium as a collective.

To avoid making this like a 20 minute read as it was in the drafts, all of these will be for a future and probably way longer post.