Apparently I took the weekend off. I took it off from just about everything. Played a lot of Oblivion.
Which brings me to today’s point.
I’m thankful for video games.
I came to gaming late. We had an Atari 2600 when I was a kid, and I suffered through Kings Quest V in the mid-nineties (or the beginning of it anyway), but I was never what I would call a gamer.
Then came Easter 2006. Some friends sat me down to play Halo. One of the selling points for this friend of mine was that the campaign has an awesome story.
Wait, what’s that you say? Video games have stories?
This was news to me. Exciting, enlightening news. The kind that opens up a whole new world.
It turned out I really sucked at Halo. The two-thumbstick orientation was really disorienting. But over the next few years I played anyway, mostly with friends. And then, when we were engaged, Drew brought over his X-box and ran me through Fable.
Since then, we’ve played dozens of games. I’m proud to say that I have gone from sucking at Halo to holding my own in Halo 2 Legendary. My favorite genres are the JRPG and the FPS…though I really can’t handle any game that doesn’t have a really good story. I hold my video games to as high a standard as my movies and books in that regard. And a lot of them hold up.
Mostly, I’m glad to be able to consume a story in a way that doesn’t feel like work. (I love books…but I feel like I’m on the clock when I read fiction. Occupational hazard, I guess.) I’m glad to be able to get together with friends and hook our boxes together and fight aliens. I’m glad to be able to hang out with Drew for hours and work our way through epic stories, and less epic ones.
It’s fun. And I love it.
And I’m thankful for that.
