to be gamers

I spent last year au pairing two boys aged 8 and 10, and I could not help but noticing how quiet they get when they are playing games, especially on their hand held Nintendos (Nintendo DS?). Games definitely proved useful at times. Also, during the course of a year the boys went from Club Penguin games on the computer to Super Mario to Lord of the Rings Conquest and shooting Stick men. They got more violent, but that could be just part of growing up as boys. While they love their games, I don't know if they can be called gamers, yet, because... they are young?! How young can you start being a gamer?

For me, gamers have one or two games that they are dedicated to. Since you need that dedication to put in the amount of time to become really skilled at a game. Because that is the aim of any game, right? To be experienced, and at its top level? Starcraft is considered a Korean national game, for example, because so many South Koreans play the game, a lot.

I tried it, once. My friends said I had to, since it was in my genes. I won. Didn't really understand why it was so popular, though. Too complicated for me, perhaps.

Because I am not a gamer. I have tried this game and that, but never got hooked to any. It's ironic that while gamers go out and buy new consoles, I could not get interested in them even though we owned SEGA, Nintendo, and PlayStation 2 console games, as well as various computer games such as Doom 2 and 3.

I took this course because I wanted to understand why video games attract people around me so much.

The second lecture kind of helped me put all these vaguely familiar names into a more organised order in my head. That's a good start. Who knows, maybe by the end of the course I will have become a gamer, too.

Viv.