My silent companion.

This is my contribution to the Blogs Of The Round Table for October 2008. The topic this month is your earliest memories of playing games with your family.

 

“I’m not buying something you’re just going to play games on.”

“Why don’t you buy this game, it’ll last longer than a book.”

My mother said both of those things to me when I was growing up. I think there was maybe three or four years between them and it’s still difficult for me to remember what it was that happened in those years to change her opinion so much.

When I first heard about this months topic for the Blogs Of The Round Table, I was sure I’d have to sit this one out as I couldn’t remember playing many games with my family. However reading some of the other entries has brought back memories that I’m sad to think I had somehow relegated to the depths of my mind. I remember games of Chess with my brother (Who I’m sure cheated) and my sister (Who I’m sure didn’t), I remember playing Trivial Pursuit with all the family. I remember stacks of board games, most of the boxes falling apart through overuse.

But most clearly I remember one game in particular, Hero Quest. I never got into Dungeons & Dragons until years later, but I never felt I needed to. In that one box (And the expansion boxes I saved up my pocket money, allowance, to buy) was all the games I could ever want. I can remember playing that game for hours in the front room with my family, with me as the gamemaster. Thinking back now I can recall everything about that room, the extendable round wooden table, the felt backed rubber mat we put over it to protect the wood. The huge onion shaped pendant light hanging from the ceiling that I always managed to hit my head on at least once a week. The pool of light it formed over  the table and my family sitting around on the threshold of the darkness. I don’t remember who exactly was there most of the time, my brother maybe, or my sister (Both older by several years), or my father if he was at home, maybe even my grandparents, but my mother was certainly there. She was always there.

I remember getting her to photocopy the character sheets, and the blank maps that came in the middle of the Quest Book so that I could plan out future stories and quest lines. I was a game designer from the age of seven and I never realised it.

As I said my mother was always there, that was true even after I’d managed to either break or lose most of the components of my Hero Quest board and had migrated to video games. Not being allowed something that I would “just play games on” I ended up with an Atari ST, which I remember somehow convincing my mother I needed to upgrade from 512K to 1MB of RAM. My first memory upgrade at barely eleven.

My mother was an enabler for my burgeoning gaming habit and I don’t think she even realised. There were times when I would spend minutes explaining to her the details of a particular level so that she would know what to say when she called the hints line at work to help me get when I was stuck.

I won a set of five Microprose games of my choice from a gaming magazine (Which I’m sure she purchased for me) and was “ill” the day they were due to arrive. We both knew I wasn’t really ill but she let it go because I think she must have seen how excited I was knowing they would be arriving soon. When they arrived she made some half hearted comment about how I shouldn’t play so much because I wasn’t feeling well, but we both knew that she didn’t have the heart to really stop me.

In that five game bundle were two titles that were to become the defining games of my youth, F-19 Stealth Fighter and Midwinter II: Flames Of Freedom. In fact I (Probably my mother actually) had purchased Flames Of Freedom previous, during the shopping trip that had inspired the second quote I believe, but it had stopped working at some point. So when I was selecting which titles I’d like to receive if I won I added it to the list. I wasted a free game to replace a title I’d already played for hours on end. I was clearly hooked.

For hours I played those games that day they arrived, and in the weeks following. Often with my mother just sitting behind me watching, maybe making the occasional comment. I don’t know what she thought, or what she felt seeing me so engaged with those games but I think she could tell I was contented. I’d not been the most well behaved child and I know it can’t have been easy for her or my father at times, so maybe she was just happy to finally have me sitting quietly and not screaming and throwing things around the room.

I never felt self-conscious playing games in front of people then, it was only later as I reached my teens that I actually started to sense that in some way playing games as much as I did was somehow “unusual”. Yet despite all that I usually found I was able to talk about gaming with my mother, again I don’t really know how much she understood, and she was clearly concerned about what affect it might be having on me,  but she listened and she didn’t judge; that was more than enough. She was concerned when I talked about pursuing a Degree course in Computer Games Programming, and in hindsight maybe rightly so, but I think my passion convinced her that I needed to try it.

Even after university she never once made a big deal of the decisions I’d made, regardless of how much I beat myself up about them.

For nearly two decades my mother has been my silent, non judgemental companion in my growing passion for games and game design. It’s sad to think I was on the cusp of forgetting everything she did, on the cusp of actually giving up on my passion. I owe her more than that, I owe myself more than that.

Thank you mum. I’ll make you proud, I promise.

Please visit the Round Table’s Main Hall for links to all entries.

Tags: Blogs Of The Round Table, Dungeons & Dragons, F-19 Stealth Fighter, Game Culture, Hero Quest, Midwinter II: Flames Of Freedom, Trivial Pursuit