I was never really alowed to play video games as a kid. I should say, I was never alowed to own a console, and I grew up in the era before smartphones and tablets were ubiquitos (look, spelling isn't my strong suit, if you've been reading this blog you will have noticed this fact. Let's just move past it ok?), so owning a computer was something I wouldn't experience until much later. All the kids at school, every friend I ever made, and all of their friends, and their friends friends, as far as I was concerned every child in the first world had this in common, they all owned some sort of box they could play video games on. And I did not. Well, that's not exactly true. Dispite the decision not to endow me with video games being shared among both my parents, my mother decided that this didn't extend to handhelds. So one day, as a reward for going to the dentist, she bought me a gameboy advance sp. I loved that thing. Blue, folding screen. I still think it's a genius form factor, although much better suited for child-sized hands than my current adult ones. Playground discussions revolved around ratched and clank, jack and daxter, portal 2, games which I could not play. I had no knowledge of video games, and no knowledge of how to atain information on the subject. The only handheld games which were extensively marketed were pokemon. I got pokemon emerald with my gameboy. It was the only decent game I owned on that system. While my mother would I'm sure try her best to pick out things she thought I'd like, they ended up being shuvelware like spongebob and friends unite, or too impossibly difficult for my premature hand-eye coordination to best, like this one astroboy game i could never get past the second level of. One day, I got lost in pokemon emerald. I never found my way again. I wondered around the map for hours and hours and hours and hours trying to figure out where to go. I never did. I never beat pokemon emerald. But I loved my blaziken named "AAA" (i did not know how the keyboard input worked when i named the starter and just spammed the a button). You can't communicate to an adult who's only experience of games is playing pac man in an arcade in the 80s that you're lost in an rpg.
Many years later, my mother would buy me a new console for a birthday or christmas, I can't remember which. It was a DSi. My first journey into the third dimension. Mario kart holds my fondest memories. And some port of forza. Racing games made sense to me. Many other games did not. There were a few games I owned which I just never figured out. At this point, playground discussion was starting to move away from mascot platformers and towards call of duty zombies. My mother would let me use her mac laptop while she watched csi. I would go on youtube and watch videos about the hidden easter eggs in cod zombies, never having played the game. Somehow I ended up watching videos about the synchronicity between half life and portal's lore, how they were set in the same universe. I didn't know what half life was, but i'd briefly played portal 2 coop with a friend once. Going to friend's houses had become somewhat of a humiliation ritual by this time. Inevitably, they'd be playing whatever on their xbox, pass me the controller and I, having never held a controller asside from these short bursts, would procede to fail at every concievable opportunity. The other person or people would laugh at first, before soon growing tired of watching my pathetic attempts to hold an analogue stick straight and snatch the controller back, never to return it to my grasp.
At this time, I became accustomed to watching people play videos games.
At some point (actually, given that people were playing beta 1.8 it must have been in september of 2011) I discovered minecraft on youtube. The yogscast, captainsparklez, syndicateproject. I watched these videos intently. I remember celebrating at the 1.0 release. Then one day, at lunch break in school, I see a group gathered around a table in the library. I go over there and see it. He's playing minecraft. minecraft is a thing only these distant youtube people play. How can it be right in front of me. Minecraft is a place where stories happen, and i watch. I remember vividly this shock, the moment it clicked in my head that you could purchase video games and play them on a computer. Like for example my family computer. I remember when I was very young, my dad would play doom on his laptop. What was he doing playing the original doom in like 2008? I have no idea. He one day announced he had snapped the disk in half and thrown it away because he got "addicted". How do you get addicted to doom? It's not like he was playing custom wads or anything. He was just going through the game normally. These are things I question now. He liked minecraft because he saw it as creative and educational. I think because he could relate it to lego. I got my first laptop. He bought me minecraft. I played it a bit. I kept losing track of my base when i'd go exploring, and having to start from scratch. You have to remember that in those days things like pressing f3 to see coords were little known strats. The common tactic was just to build a really tall pillar at your base, but my laptop would lag unless i set the render distance to minimum, so i couldn't even see it. In the settings menu, the fov slider went up to a setting called "quake pro". I thought "oh, this is the pro setting? I want to be a pro!" so i set it to that, and was amazed at how it made me run faster. Children are idiots. I discovered, with all the strip mining and grinding resources and my poor gaming skill on a laptop trackpad, Minecraft was more fun to watch than to play.
These events are slightly fictionalised, because my memories of childhood are very blury. It wasn't a great time for me. For many children, video games are an escape. I could never innocently experience games. I always wanted to play them to fit in, or join the conversation, or emulate what I saw others having fun with. They didn't catch me in the time window where I would vallue them in earnest.
In 2015 or so, I had met someone at my new school who said they could build a pc. I convinced my dad to buy me the required parts for christmas. I invited the kid over and he did his best to put it together. It was a bit scuffed, but it worked. At some point I played gta V at a friends house, the first time I ever got drunk (on alcohol stolen from his parent's cupboard). With my computer, I installed team fortress 2. When presented with the class select screen, I googled what the easiest class for a beginner is. The reddit thread I opened seemed to suggest pyro and heavy. With pyro I couldn't do anything, but as heavy I started to do ok. I played tf2 for about 40 hours, mainly as heavy. I have no recollection of what i did at that time gameplay wise. I remember thinking that i was getting pretty good, but I don't remember why I thought that. At some point I found videos of csgo on youtube. I watched those videos for months, before deciding that I should give it a go. I bought that game.
7 years and 3000 hours later, I got bored of counter strike.
Around 2000 hours in, I had hit a barrier and not been able to improve my skill beyond it. Since I had breifly experimented with speedrunning half life 1 (a story for another time), I was pretty good at bhoping and movement. I wanted to get kills in cool ways and move around the map in creative routes, and mess around. The game's community however, became more and more focused on competative tryharding. In 2018 I had taken a year off from the game after realising it was making me mad more than i was having fun. When the same thing happened in 2021, I never came back. To skim over a story, I got into tf2 again because of youtube videos. You see, I had become accustomed to watching people play videos games. 1500 hours in and I'm experiencing this again. Tf2 is a game full of bullshit. The optimal way to play is not the most fun one. Anyone playing optimally ruins the game for everyone else. And i'm not going to get into the cheater and bot situation.I could probably put another few thousand hours into tf2. I probably will. I need to stop getting mad. CSGO is a competative game. I still believe in winning and doing well.
The first video on my youtube channel has the same title as this blog post. This story is a defining one in my life. It might sound strange or stupid, but I think this distinction of not being able to participate in the common discusion point of gaming on the playground cast me as an outsider in my mind from the get go. My brother got an xbox as soon as he was old enough to use one. He has every console under the sun. I've always resented my parents for this. He was born later, at a time when the stigma around gaming had worn off on my parents. It's not about the consoles or the games. I don't care that I missed out on ratchet and clank. I could play them now but I don't want to. Who cares. I can't complain about not being bought gifts. As you read, I got a laptop and a pc at some point. Maybe a little later than my peers but that doesn't matter to me. It's the experience of being in on it. Not being laughed at when handed the controller at birthday parties. Seeing my brother play fifa or whatever with his friends after school, something I could have done but never did. I'm not complaining. Maybe I am. I'm not sure. It's arguably a good thing, I read books instead of playing games. Maybe that was good for my brain development I dont know. I just want to point out that this aspect of my upbringing feels very important to me somehow.
I switched from maining demoman to maining pyro in tf2 a little while ago. One day, a medic used kritz on me. If you don't know, this gives me guaranteed critical hits (3x damage) for the duration. Demoman synergises very well with this, as it lets all of your sticky bombs one hit kill. It's a very important time in a demoman's life, getting beefed up with kritz and going on a rampage. A very powerful feeling, one of the most powerful moments in gaming. I was defending last on pl_badwater, and the medic pops kritz on me. I wasn't expecting it, so I push up. The enemy team is standing there.
I miss every shot.
After this I thought about suicide. I've played this game for 1500 hours or so. Unlike csgo, where my 3000 hours were over the course of 7 years, I became obsessed with tf2. I got those hours in like 1 year. I play religiously. I train on practice maps. I've played all the classes competantly but 400 of those hours have been dedicated just to demoman. I just want to be good at something. My whole life, defined by the feature, "I'm quite bad at video games". Just once just let me have one thing. And the thing is, I am actually pretty good at tf2. In counter strike, I was average even at my peak. In tf2, I'm always towards the top of the scoreboard. I carry teams of noobs on the regular. I felt like, finally a game i'm good it. A game that clicks. And then, when it matters, I whif. I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games I'm quite bad at video games. No matter how much I practice, no matter the game, no matter how much autism I dedicate to it, I'll always be quite bad at video games.