You Played Mario, So What?

Nostalgia's Strange Distillation of a Strange Video Game

I don't really care to engage anyone in the discussion of what makes someone a gamer or not. My take is that if you enjoy playing video games (plural), you are a gamer regardless of what those games might be. Still, I do feel a shred of disappointment when I meet someone whose passion is focused squarely on titles like Bejeweled, Angry Birds, or Words with Friends, which are all primarily mobile-based. There is nothing wrong with these games – they all provide a continual challenge, the first requiring both mental and physical dexterity to master –, but I usually gravitate towards those who enjoy playing plot-oriented games or those with really unique mechanics or graphics. I like the big games. I also don't play mobile games.

One thing I've noticed with regards to people in my age bracket, the roughly 30-35 year-old one, is that a common response to asking someone if he or she games is "I played Mario." This means a myriad of things, of course, as Mario has been featured in over 200 video game titles since his inception. What it does usually boil down to, though, is that the person used to play either Super Mario Bros. or Super Mario World as a child. (Make that age bracket 25-35 for the latter.) Unfortunately for me, the gamer seeker, it means that the only relationship they had with "core" games began and ended over 20 years ago. Again, this is not to pass judgment. Playing video games is a hobby, and everyone is willing to devote only so much time to it, which also can translate to no time at all.

With all sincerity, I do think that Super Mario World is one of the best games ever made. It features sheer entertainment value on its surface and a ridiculous ton of secrets to discover at its core. It's also a dramatic expansion of the world explored in the previous games in the series, which vary depending on whether you were raised in Japan on the United States. What I do find peculiar is Mario's lasting legacy in culture today. As judged by the folks at Guinness, he's the second most recognizable video game character to Pac-Man, something I can delve into later. However, Mario paraphernalia has become something of a badge of acceptance among people in general, not just gamers. It is wholly appropriate to wear something with Mario or another character from his universe, probably Yoshi, without any expectation being made of your gaming habits.

We all loved Super Mario Bros., right? Maybe. I never owned a Nintendo Entertainment System, actually. My neighbor did. I moved to my hometown when I was about five years old during my kindergarten year, 1987. In 1989, shortly before I turned seven years old, a pair of kids moved in next door, and they brought with them several Atari systems and the NES. I hadn't played a video game at home yet, and I was always excited to go over there and play. I honestly really enjoyed a lot of the Atari games, though I probably wouldn't touch any of them today. I can't even recall the names of what I played. Of course, along with the NES, my neighbors had Super Mario Bros.

I wasn't good at it or any game for that matter. I never got far in SMB mainly because I didn't have the time to master it. It wasn't inside my home, and as a kid, I had enough energy to want to go outside to play sometimes. I didn't discover warp zones without his or a magazine's aid. But the game did have some appeal, and I would enjoy picking it up now and again. Coupled with not being particularly good at it, I was The Exemplar for the sway – I would attempt to coax Mario across a large gap by moving my entire body in the direction of the jump, sometimes emitting a troubled noise with it. I may not have grown out of this. It's very compelling.

What this boils down to is that you played Mario when you were little. So did I. So what? Why does he get special treatment compared to countless other video game characters?

Saturation helps.

In the US, the Nintendo Entertainment System came with Super Mario Bros. by default. OK, that's notSuper Mario Bros., which was the majority of the offerings in 1985. It was nigh a guarantee that if you owned an NES, you owned SMB. Next, without going too far into it, the NES was the only video game system being sold. After the video game crash of 1983, stores were extremely hesitant to carry another video game system. The fact is that every manufacturer tried to make an Atari or an analog of an Atari, which created an overly segmented market, meaning little money for everybody involved, most notably the stores. When that got buried (like a certain game), "video game" became a four-letter word as far as stores were concerned.
exactly accurate. If you actually cared about value, you bought an NES that was bundled with

Due to the spectacular and extremely risky efforts of Nintendo, stores finally agreed to carry the NES, and it was a booming success. (If you'd like to read more about the whole ordeal, Greg Knight wrote a great essay about it on his blog, and he provides his sources for more reading.) Overall, Nintendo sold 30 million units in the US by 1991, which accounts for roughly 11% of the entire US population by that time. That is not only a significant chunk of the population, but it also translated to 30 million default Super Marios Bros. players. The only other games to achieve similar market saturation have also been bundled inclusions. I'm also neglecting to include worldwide sales on the game, which came out to about 62 million.

When you boil all of this down, it's fair to assume about 1 in 10 people (probably a little less given more precise analysis) living in the US between 1985 and 1991 have owned Super Mario Bros. This figure does increase when you account for people who just played the game at someone else's house but didn't own it themselves. The level to which Mario has left an effect on people around my age is significant. Even if you don't play any video games today, chances are that you played at least this one title on this one system. Let's not forget that the game was featured again in Super Mario All-Stars on the SNES, made available digitally via the Wii Virtual Console, and the countless number of people my age who were in college during the Napster (read: piracy) heyday. That was a time when a ridiculous number of old games were accessible through websites and emulators, their size being remarkably permissive even on dial-up connections at home.

Only Super Mario World after it achieved a notable amount of saturation, though not as much. Also, Mario's future games did not achieve the same amount of saturation although they were all successful. Oddly enough, despite retaining the weird elements of the original, these games also were more cohesive in their execution.

Super Mario Bros. didn't make sense, something which people eat up like candy.

I'm sorry to generalize, but we didn't really analyze games when we were little. We either enjoyed playing them or we didn't. Many of our favorite childhood games' stories were contained in their manuals, the conclusions sussed out by beating them. This isn't true of all games, but the largest extent to which SMB presents a story during its gameplay is by uttering, "But our princess is in another castle." You could argue that this counts as a twist, but it happens seven times during the course of play. This was positive, though, because it meant that there was much more game to play compared to the Atari offerings, which only boosted speed or enemy frequency to maintain challenge almost endlessly.

Mushroom

As much as we joke about the elements that make up Mario games, they managed to persist through multiple iterations. Everything that is ridiculous about the first game became iconic. Mario and his brother, Luigi, are plumbers who were magically sucked down a drain into the Mushroom Kingdom. For whatever reason, these plumbers were tasked with saving Princess Toadstool, a human princess in a world full of, um, mushroom people. The kidnapper is a giant bipedal turtle, Bowser, who spits fire. So far, none of this makes sense.

The plumbers, one at a time, must proceed through stages that inexplicably contain giant pipes everywhere, only some of which they can or have to enter to proceed. They can also breathe underwater ad infinitum, though that is eventually adjusted in Mario 64. The first enemy Mario encounters is a goomba, which is a mushroom-like thing that he can stomp on once to eliminate. (In 1985, this was not the most common way to murder animals or the like, I promise you.) The goomba is followed by a koopa troopa, a smaller bipedal turtle that can be stomped on so as to throw his shell around. To aid Mario in his quest, he must punch blocks with question marks on them, which can yield coins in a world without an economy, mushrooms that makes him grow larger for some reason, mushrooms that grant him extra lives because that's a thing down there, or fire flowers, which both alter his outfit and allow him to shoot fire. You encounter most of these things in under a minute after starting the game.

Also a mushroom

If the internet today is any indicator, it should then become no surprise that everything that made up Super Mario Bros. became memorable by virtue of the fact that it didn't make sense. Yes, it was a good game which featured challenging platforming gameplay and a handful of secrets and tricks. But these elements didn't contribute to today's popular culture; rather, they served to retain a section of that population as gamers and inspire future, more cohesive games. Each ridiculous aspect about the Mario universe stands out from one another and so becomes easily memorable and easily marketable in the future. Society loves disruption. Then, along came Yoshi, the Mario equivalent of a kitten.

Memories become distilled over time. Icons remain.

As stated above, Mario is not the most recognizable video game character ever. Pac-Man is. First, Pac-Man manages to increase the age bracket again from the larger end, and as I pointed out from my personal story, some people were still playing Atari in the late 80s. However, Pac-Man's fame came from the arcade; the Atari version of the game was so over-simplified that it was rejected compared to the original. His recognition stems from his form. He's a circle missing a piece, a yellow pie. Why he's not as marketable today as Mario probably lays with the fact that his universe lacks enough other pieces to be as interesting. Aside from Pac-Man, there are only the differently-colored ghosts and the white pellets. If Pokémon was only about Ash and Pikachu, it wouldn't be as popular. The hook is the pieces, the other pokémon, who are more memorable and universal than the games they star in. Again, this is a matter of popular culture versus smaller subsects, i.e., gaming or anime cultures.

Applying this idea to Super Mario Bros., it's not hard to discern why we hold Mario and the other pieces dear. Over time, the game has become pieces, all of which are weird and colorful, iconic and cute. To its credit, none of the enemies are menacing in their appearance save for Bowser, so they were adopted into popular culture as well. But you'll notice that while people will recognize a goomba or a koopa troopa whether or not they can name them, they are less familiar with other enemies from the series. They will recognize the sound of a coin being grabbed. And everyone knows the music. Why? Also as mentioned, you encounter these things in under a minute after starting the game.

This is ultimately the key behind each icon's success, including Mario. If you've played and finished Super Mario Bros., if you've played the game on and off at a friend's house, or if you started the game and decided it ultimately wasn't for you, you remember that first minute more than anything else about it. Everyone remembers the pieces despite having very different memories of the gameplay. Over time, the gameplay doesn't last so much, and this idea crosses over into other games that have become iconic over time, though less so, such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Street Fighter II. With enough saturation and enough disparate elements, those jarring pieces juxtaposed against one another become memorable and all that is left to remember if you didn't pursue playing video games as a hobby.

The same applies to movies (Indiana Jones, E.T., Back to the Future), books (If You Give A Mouse A Cookie, Amelia Bedelia, Choose Your Own Adventure), and even other forms of art (Mona Lisa, Persistence of Memory, Moonlight Sonata). We remember their essence and their elements more so than their experience or sometimes their names or the names of their elements. This is most true of video games because movies, books, paintings, and music don't require skill to complete experiencing them. Many people don't finish games, so it's the beginnings that matter most.

Mario rode the unexpected booming success of the Nintendo Entertainment System into our memories and our hearts despite us. He became equivalent with our childhood regardless of the amount of time we spent with him. He was something that was there when we were a child, and we either interacted by controlling or spectating. It doesn't take a psychology degree to know that we tend to hold pieces of our childhood dear even if our childhood as a whole was unpleasant. We hold onto the things we can remember because every day we forget more and more about what happened to us back then.

Unlike a good many things that existed back then, Mario is immortal. The people have chosen to keep him alive. I'm one of them, I suppose.

Images obtained from various places around the internet. If you own an image and would like me to remove it, please email me, and I will do so.

Social Gaming: How Papo & Yo Redefined the Concept for Me

Expanding the definition of coop

I have established before that I don't really play games with people. Whether that means actually playing a cooperative mode with a friend or fighting against anonymous players online, generally my gameplay experience only involves myself. There are some exceptions for games that make it seem worthwhile to foray into multiplayer, but I only buy a game for its single-player offerings. Everything else is just icing or filler. Thus, it came as a huge surprise to me that my fondest memory of playing a game this year with another human being actually involved a completely single-player game, Papo & Yo.

I had read enough about Papo & Yo to be enthralled with the idea before the first trailer appeared. At that point, I was pre-enamored with it. Although I've only thus written about what a departure the soundtrack is, the game as a whole is remarkably different in tone and experience from the majority of games out there. It is certainly rare to play what amounts to a single writer's autobiography, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. However, it is possible that my review of the game was disingenuous – I didn't tell you readers what really happened.

Twitter is kind of a new beast to me. My job was sending me on a trip to Berkeley, CA in February of 2010, and I decided to try the bandwagon out, tweeting about my trip. I did not consider the ample opportunities it possessed, but one thing that began to stick out was how accessible people and companies became. Celebrities and journalists tweet daily and sometimes actually respond to people who follow them. Companies, on the other hand, hire community managers to handle their official accounts and respond to tweets either praising them for excellent service or deriding them for subpar pizza. What they offer is essentially a free but invaluable product by turning companies into humans replete with feelings and fluids. A bad corporation is a bad corporation, but community managers at least entertain the idea that your complaint reaches actual people who care that you had a poor experience. You and I know your complaint probably won't reach the top dogs of the company unless he or she has a Twitter account.

Alright, this was about Papo & Yo. I decided that I would take this review really seriously. This would be the first new game I'd be reviewing within a reasonable window of its release, and I sat with a notebook by my side to make sure I wrote down everything, good or bad, worth writing about. Despite the damage it can do to the experience, I also did a bit of live tweeting, i.e., posting to Twitter while I played the game. This caught the attention of Minority Media's community manager, Deborah Chantson, who heartily replied to me to wish me enjoyment. (Sadly, I did not log any of our tweets, and I cannot yet access my archive, so there'll be paraphrasing from here on.) Because I had only just started the game, there were a number of events in the first few chapters that made me wonder if they were better explained later on, something that is rather important to me. So I responded to Deb, as she calls herself, stating, "I have so many questions."

Thus, the game began to change for me. Deb, out of a sincere desire to assist all the fans, insisted on Direct Messaging me to answer my questions, thinking I was stuck on a puzzle or something. At the time, I thought it was hilarious, but I didn't take into account that the developer had posted a day-one patch to the game to fix issues, which hampered the game's scores with Polygon and IGN. (I don't suggest bringing those up to her.) She was a woman on a mission, and given the timing, I'm inclined to believe she'd pop out of my PS3 with a screwdriver if it would help. Of course, I didn't have any problems navigating the puzzles, which I found to be fairly straight-forward and easy. But Deb was nice, and sincerely wanted to talk about the game. I've never really done that before, that is, talk deeply about a game I was playing while I was playing it for the first time.*

The conversation didn't take long to devolve into other topics, but Deb always maintained a focus on making sure I was having fun. She even tried to excuse herself to let me play, but that didn't work out. I was truly enthralled to be communicating with someone who was passionate about the game I was playing and who also worked for the developer. That is something that doesn't happen often to anyone that isn't a hired tester. And this unique experience has stayed with me. There is playing the same game with someone, plowing through levels with a digital companion at your side. There is playing against someone, killing each other over and over again, or simply getting more points at sports. But this was like playing with a little Papo & Yo guardian angel, someone who has no direct impact on the game but makes the experience special nonetheless.

I understand that I can't really encourage anyone to ask their favorite developers' community managers to babysit them while they play.** However, I will encourage you to feel at liberty try to communicate with those developers somehow, whether it is a reference on Twitter or just an email discussing your experience. There are real people who read these things and pass it on to the ones you want to hear it most. Gaming isn't the same landscape it was 20 years ago. We no longer play in our individual bubbles anymore, and social networking is pervading the lifestyle in remarkable ways. It is easier to access those who care that you are playing something they worked very hard on, and I'm willing to bet they appreciate your effort as much as you do theirs.

Are you a player who had a unique gaming experience with a community manager? Are you a community manager that had a unique gaming experience with a player? I would love to hear about it!

* I'd like to note that Deb and I didn't discuss any specific features of the game nor its bugs, which I do talk about in my review. We mostly discussed the concept and the company, none of which was relevant to a review or my opinion of the game. She found out my final thoughts on the game at the same time as everyone else on the internet.

** I pity the community manager who would chat through someone's experience playing a sandbox game. "I just sold my 20th box of crumpled cigarettes! (Far Cry 3)" "Oh, that's nice."

Trolling Needs to Stop

A Big and Unfocused TL;DR about Hurricane Sandy and Loss

On Monday, around 7 PM, the power to my apartment went out entirely. I had just finished Dishonored (review coming) earlier that day and was just perusing around the internet. This power outage, sadly, was no coincidence. It was the result of the infamous Hurricane Sandy, which tore its way through the northeast. Notably, it left millions of homes and businesses in my home state, New Jersey, without power. Worse, it devastated the Jersey shore, destroying homes, tearing up boardwalks, and leaving entire towns covered in water and sand. The photos are heartbreaking, and though I am an indoors kind of guy, I feel severely dismayed about what has passed through my state.

As of 11:50 AM yesterday, power returned to my apartment following a 15-minute fake out the previous day. Since then, I have been able to enjoy heat, hot water, and internet unfettered. I am lucky, however you wish to interpret the word. Many people in New Jersey and New York City are still without power, and many are still evacuated from their homes, living in hotels or with family if they managed to escape the hurricane in the first place. Although my home has been returned to normalcy, the fact is that the area around me still has not. Supermarket stock is being wiped out as soon as it is put on the shelves because of people's empty refrigerators at home. Gas stations that manage to get power have lines going down highways within five minutes of reopening, and many are reporting that they have run out of gas due to their supply being overtaxed. For lack of a better word, it is chaos out there.

By now, you are probably wondering why I am talking about this on my video game blog. Aside from a single game reference, this largely seems irrelevant. Here's the truth, and it is a truth I shared with a lot of gamers out there. It was not long before I missed my video games in a bad way. During the week, I work full time, and I miss playing. Work also requires me to travel, which means even less gaming. But the fact that it's there when I get home along with my partner and two cats is comforting. Even when I'm home doing something else, I know I can power on my PC or PS3 and escape into the fantasy world some video game developer has envisioned. Whatever psychological reading one can make from it, I do use video games and their environments as an escape from the day-to-day grind. For nearly three full days, I had no escape. I lived minute to minute completely confronted with darkness, cold, and boredom.

This isn't about me, though. I feel so close to my video game hobby that the thought there are others out there presently deprived of their passion upsets me. Video games can be seen as juvenile by the ignorant public, but they mean a lot to a lot of people. Also, if you're purely a console or computer player like I am, it's not as portable a hobby. You can't leave your home with a game in hand and expect that, like a DVD, your family member or hotel has something to play it. For those who have lost their homes entirely, they have also lost hundreds to thousands of dollars worth of their prime source of joy. And along with books or DVDs, when it comes to rebuilding, these objects - these escapes - will not be the first items they purchase to return to normalcy. Seeking warmth and food is the primary objective for a lot of families right now, and no amount of I Am Alive or Red Dead Redemption playing has prepared any one of us to deal with constantly trying to survive. The comfort of video games, too, is that we are not personally dealing with the protagonists' problems.

Maybe this is a surprise, but this isn't about those people either. The fact is that daily, gamers around the world act privileged to a disturbing degree, and it's because they don't deal with real loss. The internet has become a hot bed of disturbing trends in behavior mostly enabled by the anonymity it provides. When a game reviewer gives a big-budget game an 8 out of 10, there are those who feel entitled to attack that reviewer personally, threatening his life and his family. Two points higher, and people go on long diatribes about how the reviewer was bought and exerting effort to discredit him, knowing nothing about the actual truth or his personal financial situation, which I'm pretty sure is only slightly above that of a retail worker's. If a woman wants to engage the gaming world in an open discussion about the disservice video games do to women, it is unnervingly OK to unload threats of rape and violence that would make most prison inmates blush. Lastly, when a trusted developer releases a subpar (not necessarily awful) game, cries of execution and public shaming begin to surface.

You know, it's fine to complain. Don't let anyone tell you that you don't have a right to complain. It is impossible to spend every minute of every day deciding whether the problem you're experiencing right now is as big as a starving child in Africa or a cancer patient in Haiti. When your game freezes or your hero unheroically falls through the floor he was standing on, you have every right to feel bothered. It is by a reasonable set of standards that developers can create gaming experiences which successfully act as escapes for us, the gamers. However, complaining and wishing loss on anyone for any reason are two seriously different actions. Do not lose sight of the fact that you are physically able to complain. You have a body that functions as you desire it to do so, not strapped to a wheelchair and blinking to communicate. Don't forget that whatever goes wrong in the game, you can reset and keep playing because you have a home, electricity, and a system to play it on. There are others who wish that your problems were the only ones they had to worry about, but more importantly, they wouldn't wish their experience on someone. Someone whose spouse and son drowned in a flooding basement during a hurricane would not threaten pain or loss of life to someone else who wants to talk about redefining gender expectations.

Here is the TL;DR for those of you who just want the point:
Keep complaining, and try offering constructive criticism to make gaming continuously better. But, until a game developer, publisher, journalist, or even player causes you or your family significant loss of wealth (bankruptcy), shelter (home destroyed by tide), or livelihood (more games with female or gay protagonists do not threaten this category), and sometimes even then, you have no right to threaten that person or company violently or sadistically. That is called harassment, and it is destructive and sickening. Moreover, it does not serve the gaming world, including yourself. Things will not get better because of your threats and insults.

I don't have a huge readership here, and maybe I never will, but if this post nets me a label as a "White Knight Fag" or some such, then I will embrace it. There is a whole army of White Knight Fags ready to clean up this goddamn kingdom.

Play with My Father

Just once would be nice.

I think it would be fair to say I could attribute my love of video games to my father. Well, sort of. My father was always into new technology, and he always wanted to show me the latest gizmo he bought. His interest in electronics and the like was the polar opposite of my mother, who continually resisted anything that came around. Naturally, I became attracted to the digital image and its interactive manipulation. Despite how he always exposed me to and bought me new electronics and toys, it saddens me that he never really joined me in playing them. Even worse, until recently, he always expressed a constant derision towards my life's passion.

Before there was color, there was green.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for the original Nintendo Game Boy. To this day, it is the only handheld system I ever owned, and I poured a lot of hours into it. In fact, I still have it, though I haven't tested its operational faculty in a number of years. Not that I was big into sharing, but I was surprised when my father wanted to play Tetris on occasion. I didn't appreciate it then, but looking back, it was cool that he wanted to play a game at all. That was the only one, though, and he never expressed any interest in the other games I had. Eventually, he also stopped playing Tetris, though he never played it enough for it to be considered sudden. That was it. I never saw him play another game since.

That isn't to say that was the last game he showed interest in. One day, when our home computer was still the Macintosh Performa, he came home with Zork Nemesis: The Forbidden Lands, a graphic adventure game in the same vein as Myst. I was definitely excited since I loved Myst and really looked forward to playing another puzzle game, and I was excited that he wanted to play it with me. The excitement was over almost as quickly as it began because we ignored the hardware specifications that called for at least double the RAM we had on board, and the game would not even launch. As unfortunate as this was, it was more disappointing when he never came back around to play even after we bought and installed the upgrade. I don't know why, and I didn't ask. I just played and enjoyed the game alone and thought nothing of it.

So that was the last game he ever told me he wanted to play, and he never played it. This actually never began to bother me until the last few years. My parents and I did a lot of things separately. Sometimes, we'd all watch the same TV program in our own rooms. Thus, playing video games by myself didn't phase me one bit, and I never grew a desire to play with them either. Nothing about that seemed wrong to me. The time I would spend with friends was sporadic (I was not popular), so I found myself gravitating towards more single-player experiences. Sure, there were games like Street Fighter II and Eternal Champions that were more fun to play with friends, but you wouldn't believe how much time I'd spend playing against myself or screwing with Game Genie codes.

So began my own personal adventure.

Coasting a large number of years into the future, my true love of video games was ignited when I played Final Fantasy VII on PC in 1999, the first half of the last year of high school. Although I played Myst, most of the games I played offered shallower stories; I never encountered something so layered nor with optional story content to discover. After that, I became more insistent that I continually needed something to play. I needed another story. My first "real" relationship, which took place during most of my time in college, was with a guy who would play with me. We even bought a Nintendo GameCube together. Although we had multiplayer games to play with friends, such as Super Smash Bros. Melee and Super Monkey Ball, our definition of playing with each other and friends often meant one person playing a single-player adventure while others observed. Even today, this is how I typically enjoy experiencing new games – watching friends demonstrate what they have to offer. It may sound silly, but to me, any game was as exciting to watch as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

Years after dropping that human waste of time, I held out until I met another guy who shared a passion for video games with me. At the time, it was more challenging than it probably is now, what with Gaymercon starting next year. But I met the love of my life, and we have spent six awesome years now playing and loving. I definitely play significantly more than he does, but he has always shown interest, and there are games he loves and have elicited strong emotional responses from him. (He handled a certain scene in Final Fantasy VII a lot worse than I ever did.) However, it was also during the time we've spent together that my father became rather adversarial towards my hobby. My parents naturally ask what I've been up to since the last time I've seen them, and usually I answer with a game I'm playing. My father's natural response has always been dismissive, instantly losing interest in me talking about it further. But there eventually came snide comments, too. I remember speaking at dinner about the Overlord DLC for Mass Effect 2, and I specifically wanted to talk about it because of how it involves autism. My only brother is autistic, so it is definitely a relevant topic of discussion in their house. However, when I began to explain that Mass Effect is a science fiction game, my dad quipped, "all [video games] are science fiction." No, it doesn't make any sense, but I could tell there was no point in continuing to talk about it.

The majority of the Myst games were about a father's relationship with his sons.

Things came to a head a few weeks ago as my boyfriend and I were leaving my parents' house to go home. My father asked what we'd be doing with the rest of the night, and I stated that I'd be playing, and my boyfriend stated he'd be watching a movie and maybe playing. His response was something to the effect of "Tell me how it is. The movie, not the video games. I don't care about that shit." So the conversation went.

"They're not shit."
"I think they're shit."
"How can you continue to put down the thing I love to do most like that?"
"It's shit to me. What do you want me to say?"
"I would never put down something you're passionate about. And it's shit that you would say something like that to me."

He just shrugged, but I was rather angry as I drove off. I always got annoyed when he'd dismiss me, but this just took the cake. It was the first time he really just said it plainly, and he managed to make it as offensive as possible. The last thing I said was true, though. I may not have interest in many things my friends love, such as sports, – I may not even care the slightest bit about them – but I would never tell someone that this thing he or she is so excited about is shit. I'd just say I don't like it myself.

Deus Ex: Human Revolutions allows the player to proceed through the whole game without killing (almost) anyone.

From this negative experience came a positive.  It took two weeks, but shortly after my birthday, in response to something completely unrelated, he apologized. He expressed a sincere regret for putting down what I love to do. My father also finally articulated one of his issues with video games, that being the violence in them. It is kind of funny, actually, since he watches and likes some violent movies, and he even owns some firearms. However, I think the issue for him is actually participating in the violence, something movies don't require of the viewer. He actually expressed that he loved Myst, which I don't remember him playing but was once the buzz of the house. This was a significant step forward, and I felt very touched to finally learn more about him.

My response to him was that not every game is violent, of course. Without a doubt, I own some games like Mortal Kombat where the violence is gratuitous, but I wanted to tell him that I'm not always a death dealer. Aside from sharing the artfulness of games like Journey and Papo & Yo, I also went on to talk about games like Grand Theft Auto IV, which match exciting and well-written plots with the violence. I even expressed that some of the best games make you question whether you want to commit violence like Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Most importantly, I told him that I regret never playing Zork Nemesis with him. It only took 16 years to realize that it would have been nice.

Zork Nemesis, the bonding experience that never was.

Sadly, I think that's the end of the positive result. I told him that I own all the games from the Myst series, the sequel, Riven, being incredible, and how I could easily install them and Zork Nemesis on his laptop. However, he said he's too old to play them and doesn't have the attention span for them. I feel like I lost something there. I don't know what exactly. I don't know that if I attempted to include him on what I was playing when I was younger that he would've joined me. Still, I feel much better knowing that my father understands what it means when someone puts down something you care about and that we're past that era of our relationship. I hope one day he'll play by my side, though.

What about you? How involved are your parents with what you're passionate about? Do you play games with either of them? Please share your experience.