Both of my parents are programmers :P
I had a PC ever since I was born (there is a pic of my very small self, wearing diapers and playing a PC game :D )
Idk what was the first game I played.... It was either Sokoban, or Rescue Rover, or Fatty Bear, or Putt-Putt... one of these :D
Also, I live in the capital city, with no place to play outside :P I really hate when people tell me to play outside. Oh, really? Where exactly? On the streets with cars, or in the dogsh*t filled park, with muggers? -.-
Sooo I ended up playing PC games at home instead.

Plus I had horrible classmates in elementary school, wich turned me to my PC even more =/ *foreveralone*

Also in elementary school I was not allowed to go home alone, instead mom took me to her workplace, where I got a PC so I stay quiet :D My mom's colleagues cop... I mean borrowed me games, like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Diablo 2 (<- I got this from the securiy guard who played this, instead of working XD), Might and Magic 6, Sheep, some RPG maker games, and some other simple games.
Sometimes after school her friend took me to their home, where her son+me played PC games. (Under playing I mean he played, I watched -.-)

In high school I was already a PC game addict, but at least my (mostly male) classmates had someone to turn to if they had tech issues with their games :P

Soo... this is the story of my gaming history.

And why do I love games?
I love fantasy. I love reading fantasy, and watching fantasy.... but instead of reading a book with a pre-written story, I prefer making my own story. Either writing something, tinkering with RPG maker, or playing a game, where I shape the story myself (the reason RPGs are my favourites :D )

Well, I'd fit both the criteria for being a gamer and for not being a gamer then, because I hardly ever go back to any games I've played through either. There are just too many other games that require my attention. ;)

Back in middle school, one of my friends (the same one who'd organized my first pen-&-paper D&D games) got an Apple ][+. After spending countless school nights over there playing games like Pong and Breakout, I begged my father to get me the same setup for myself.

Either along with the purchase or soon after, I acquired The Cosmic Balance and the original Ultima, and the rest is history. This. Oh, so very much this.

But you probably play more than one game every few months :) My husband's gaming habits are very much nostalgia based -- I mean, he does have a reasonable collection of digital games, but mostly from bundles where he wanted a few of the games and felt the price was reasonable. He much prefers movies and television shows to gaming (I had stated that when I was writing out the post, but evidently deleted it when I was redoing sections), and he's only played three games since the beginning of the year, four when he gets onto SR4. He has nothing on his wishlist, and I guarantee you he'll get through the Steam Summer sales without buying anything new.

I was always a bit of a closeted gamer, playing a whole lot without having any real ambition of understanding a greater community. I played educational games on our MS-DOS machine, got an N64 as my first console with a weekly renting of video games from a nearby store, fell into playing Diablo 2 HABITUALLY, then eventually into World of Warcraft. That was about the only game I played for a long time.

Much later on, I went to a Summer Camp to learn how to do video making. Very fun experience all around, but I saw these guys playing something on the computers during break. I slipped over, and saw them whizzing through holes on the walls and dodging flames of doom with a pallet of blue and orange. It was Portal, and they exuberantly told me about a supposedly hilarious ending in it.

Now, I believe I had bought the Orange Box once before, and possibly even made a Steam Account, but I couldn't find either of those so I started anew. The strangeness of the digital format from then on became part of my draw to this expansive realm, but I didn't get to Portal right away. Instead I played a massive amount of Team Fortress, honing my skills in this wholly engrossing FPS experience.

None were so engrossing though as Half-Life 2. I had heard about the series before, and been dismissive of it. I'm not really sure why that was, but I really didn't care to boot it up. Boredom brings all souls to their knees though, so I let it funnel into my computer and had a go. It immediately became my favorite game of all time.

No matter the colorful nostalgic experiences I had experienced on my N64, PS2, and Gamecube (along with some fantastic games in their own right), I could not deny that Half-Life 2 opened my eyes to gaming. Of course, there is no one factor, for no matter how good that game is, it correlated with other things in my life, like joining a film podcast on a gamin website and getting into game reviews as a whole.

My Steam library currently holds 186 games and my GoG, 89. I have recently begun some serious collection of consoles both handheld and main which I owned back in the day, and have an incredible interest in gaming history. Most strikingly of all, my filmic ambitions have given way to that of gaming. I am currently going to college in the art of game design. Had it not been for that period in my life, I may have never realized how important games were and now are to me.

Viva la Nintendo! Viva la Valve!

tinyE played the beta version of chess.

My father was an Amstrad and my mother smelled of TRS80s.

Okay so we're both really fucking old. :P

My growing interest in old computers and old software (DOS, Windows 3.1/95/ME/etc) got me started in gaming, pretty much :-)

(I'm a PC gamer, as we never owned any consoles)

So those classmates were horrible to you and made you suffer, but they also helped you enter the amazing world of gaming? So the joke is on them. :)

Depends... I loved games, because in the games I was the hero, unlike in real life, where I was the loser :P So I entered the world of games partially because of them, yes. (I had no friends to go out, since they all hated me for being poor, and being trash at sports :P )
On the other hand I became a bit too anti-social thanks to this. In high school I was just sitting at my place, trying to learn how to make friends by observing my classmates... it was weird o_o But at least my high-school classmates were awesome, and totally accepted me for being PC-addicted, especially because I helped everybody, even the teachers, with their tech problems xD

Since I was 4 or 5 my parents bought me and Amiga 600 at the time, my first was Robocop. Over the years I kept wanting more games and I ended up with over 300 floppy disks full of games. At the time (mid 90's) an Amiga was very popular here in Malta, my cousin had an Amiga 500 and almost every kid in the area. That's how I started.

Then my parents got a 486DX4 (oh yeah baby now we're talking 16mb ram), which we used for Encarta and educational use for a couple of years. Then I discovered Doom,Quake, Screamer 2, my life was changed forever. I started buying a lot of games which I still have in perfect condition to this day. I've used the 486 till it's hard disk died in 2000.

This is how I started life as a gamer, what followed after those years was a new Pentium 4 and games such as Doom 3, UT2004, Morrowind and Oblivion, NFS Underground and the likes.

My only regret during the early years was that I didn't play games such as the classic Bioware D&Ds. I guess I was too young and immature to appreciate such games and that's why I didn't buy them.

Now I think I'm a little too addicted to games, I have like 220 boxed games, 182 on steam and 84 on GOG and I haven't even finished 1/4th of those. The retail ones have been more of a collection now and I keep buying different editions of the same game (like my double and triple copies of Skyrim, Morrowind and Oblivion).


I'm a Gamer :D

Well, I think it's a common occurence - to run away from the real-life problems to games/books/TV series etc. I was the same, always the outsider, the freak. Of course, that was when I was a teenager, now I'm a different person but still love fantasy games and books. But now it's more of a stress reliever than running away from my own insecurities. So, in the past games were my therapy, right now they are just a hobby :)

Sounds more like medication than actual therapy. Did playing games actually help you to overcome your insecurities or just to distract you from them?

For me video games were just a distraction. To overcome them I needed to finish elementary school to leave those idiots behind, and start doing martial arts to gain self confidence.

I still use them as distraction if I'm worried about something I do not want to think about. Heck, even my mom can't stop playing FarmVille when she is very worried about something.