Some Thoughts on Gaming and Gamers

I was talking with a friend back and forth recently about gaming and accessibility in gaming, and it inspired me to write my thoughts on gaming in general. My thoughts, my relationship with it, praise as well as criticism (to the extent I can do it justice). Accessibility is not my strong suit and I’m trying to learn more about it all the time, and of course I’d like to make anything I produce as accessible as possible. I just don’t always know how. I think switching the blog to Hugo helps; with an almost-plaintext blog, it should be readable by all sorts of tools (dis volentibus!). As I’ve mentioned before, please let me know if there’s anything I can do that would improve your experience of reading my work here. That said, pergamus.

My parents bought me a NES in 1989 when I was 5. I think they probably just thought “hey, he’s a kid, he’ll love this!” And what a good Christmas present it was. I remember setting it up and playing it. Weirdly enough, I have a ‘core memory’ of playing Duck Hunt on my grandparents’ TV on Christmas morning, and Super Mario Bros. as well, of course. My grandparents had a big-screen TV and it was awesome to play the NES on there. I remember playing a ton of Mario games over the years after that, including 2 and 3, of course. And I was ever so excited to get a SNES when I started hearing about its imminent release.

Around 1991, we got the SNES as another fabulous Christmas gift. My parents got it for me, and chipped in for a couple of games (naturally, Super Mario World), and my other family members each bought a game or so. I can’t remember all of the original slate, but I think it included things like Star Fox, Super Star Wars, Donkey Kong Country, F-Zero, and maybe A Link to the Past? Basically, a whole slew of fantastic games, a great starter pack for the console. I played the hell out of Super Mario World and basically everything else. The NES and SNES will always be among my favorite consoles of all time, perhaps due to nostalgia, I don’t know, but they’re also just objectively full of wonderful games.

Over the years I had other Christmases with other systems (N64, GameCube, PSX; hell, even the 3DS at some point). So a lot of my memories back then revolve around videogames, since it was a huge deal for me as a kid (for better or for worse). I won’t delve too deeply into those; NES and SNES were easily, as I mentioned the most important, although I do love those other systems a lot too.

I remember hanging out with my cousin one time, maybe a decade or so ago, and he had just bought a Retron 5 (I think that was the name?), which was basically a 3rd-party console that accepted original SNES cartridges. I’m not sure what inspired him to get that, but he was very excited about it at the time. I don’t think he knew what he was getting himself into, because when my sister and I tried to show him SNES games on our original SNES, he was like “what are these? this is so boring!” or something like that. And my sister and I both looked at each other and just sorta facepalmed, really surprised that he felt that way, since we thought he was missing out, of course! We both thought “why wouldn’t everyone like these systems that we grew up on and love? what’s wrong with him?”

And I realize now that that was a fairly ignorant attitude to take away from the situation. Of course he didn’t think SNES games looked like “real” games, because he’d grown up on Wii and later systems, with relatively flashy graphics, which were very much “advanced” compared to the now-“rudimentary” SNES graphics and even controls. A good analogy would be if we, as kids, were shown Pong or something a few generations back by our parents, who adored that sort of thing, and we, comparing them to the NES/SNES, said “what the hell is this? this isn’t a game! this is boring!” &c. &c. It is all a matter of perspective, as with so many other things in life. I have a germane example of that in action, but my reaction wasn’t exactly what you’d expect. My mom and dad had an Atari when they were younger, and other older systems. My parents even had an Atari system when I was very young, one that had small brown cartridges that you’d seat vertically in the system. It had a monitor, keyboard, and one-button joystick. I think it may have been an Atari 800, but I’m not sure exactly. I don’t remember it very clearly except we had a BASIC cartridge that my dad used to like to play around with, a basketball game, and Star Raiders, which seemed like a weird mishmash of Star Wars and Star Trek(but more on the Trek side of things, I think). So I guess the NES wasn’t actually my first exposure to videogames, but it was definitely my first system of my ‘own,’ if you will.

As I was saying, contrary to expectation, my parents were excited about and enjoyed the Atari system we had, and that excitement was infectious! I played it a lot but I don’t think my sister was ever really into it. It’s not like this system was super old at the time, though, so it wasn’t exactly like Pong or whatever, but it was pretty close. What I’m trying to get at is that every generation has their likes and dislikes, and gaming is a good example of this. For a long time I didn’t understand why my cousins, or younger people in general, didn’t appreciate the gaming “classics” that I felt they should be appreciating, the things that paved the way for their Wiis and Switches and all that sort of thing. But that’s the wrong attitude to have. If someone wants to go back and revisit those things and learn to appreciate them, awesome, but it’s not a must, and that’s OK. I don’t understand a lot of the newer systems myself, and don’t particularly like them, but plenty of people love them. My spouse asked me yesterday “do you think you’ll ever get another game console?” and I said “I don’t know, probably not… since I can emulate or play most things on the computer.” And that’s OK with me. It is a two-way street and ideally should be, but not everyone is going to like (or dislike, for that matter), the same things.

I wanted to share another core gaming memory with y’all. When I was in middle school (I think? Fuzzy), my grandpa scored a deal on a Commodore 64 at a garage sale and was really excited to share the discovery with me. Being into all things tech, and gaming, I was totally down for it, and helped him get it set up and running. I’d never seen a C64 before and didn’t entirely know what I was doing, but I was familiar with 5 1/4" floppies, since we’d had them on our first computer in 1993. The C64 was just a very different paradigm, since in contrast to my then-current PC, it had 64Kb of RAM to load everything into, and I’m sure they had to use a lot of tricks to make things work within those constraints. But I remember fondly playing games like Zaxxon and others on there, and I played it every chance I got at my grandparents’ house. One of the disks included with the set was something called GEOS. When I loaded that up, it blew my mind: it was a whole OS on a 5 1/4" disk, with a GUI and everything, and looked like an early precursor to MacOS, but all color! It had a word processor and I think even some office suite programs. I was astounded that all of this would somehow fit into 64Kb, and while I didn’t find it all that usable for productivity, I was fascinated by the fact that some people had likely used this as a proper OS for years. Eventually my grandpa let me have the C64 and I took it back to my house and kept playing around with it, but IIRC it eventually gave up the ghost. So it goes.

Another sidebar: my grandpa always found interesting treasures when he went places. He found a little electronic console of a game called Scramble, which is a really lovely little side-scrolling space shooter that functions, IIRC, with LEDs, not a LCD. I thought it was so cool and played it all the time, and really enjoyed it. I think he even had a couple version of it; one stopped working and he eventually sourced another somehow. I’ve seen ROMs of it listed on the internet in various places and I’d like to revisit it sometime, as I really, really enjoyed that game.

I’ve written elsewhere about my love for retro videogames, so I won’t rehash too much of that here. If you want to foster your own love of retro games, please feel free to check out my recommendations at that link.

So that’s sort of the prolegomena part, my own personal history with gaming. Now I’d like to pivot and talk about gatekeeping and accessibility in particular. When I was a kid, I remember my sister, for a long time, just liked watching me play games and enjoyed it. Eventually, though, she became interested in playing games herself, and I was frustrated at having to share the system(s) with her. That eventually passed, though, and we started enjoying videogames together, and it was great, since I had someone to talk about them with and play with! For a long time, guys both seemed to love and loathe the idea of an elusive “gamer girl” archetype, a woman who loved videogames and could hang out with them. I’ve always welcomed that and wanted to meet more women into games, but at the same time perhaps women felt uncomfortable being gamers (too tomboyish? Not cool! Totally fine). I honestly don’t know but it’s a shame, and all the GamerGate awfulness has confirmed that those attitudes by men are very much still around, and still as toxic as ever, if not worse.

That brings me to gatekeeping. I know for a time that I probably had some gatekeepy attitudes, believing that there were “real” and “fake” gamers, depending on how people chose to engage (or not) with games. Some genres were more “serious” than others, some games were so obviously “not” games, &c. &c. Which is all gatekeeping nonsense at its core. As I was discussing with my friend yesterday, if you play games, you’re a “gamer,” simple as that. There is no other qualification for it. If you enjoy games, congratulations, you’re a gamer! There is not, and should not be, any “purity test” for gaming of any kind. There are games out there for everyone these days: RPGs, shooters, action games, platformers, fighting games, puzzle games, visual novels, adventure games, whatever you want to play! It’s out there and there for you to enjoy! As others have said, “don’t yuck my yum,” since everyone likes different things, and everyone engages with this vast, nearly boundless medium in different ways. As well they should! Gaming should be a venue open to everyone, whether you’re a casual gamer or play every day, it doesn’t matter. Don’t let anyone shame you into thinking you don’t deserve to play games, that you’re somehow lesser than them because you don’t play the same games as them or whatever. It’s ridiculous and I never want to contribute to those harmful attitudes. Encouraging more people to play games, eliminating barriers to it, not only will give you more people to talk about games with and geek out, but will likely lead to more games being created in general! Of course, games are often created by those who love playing them, and I think it’s a wonderful thing.

On that note – accessibility. I don’t claim to know a lot, or really, hardly anything about accessibility, and I have a whole lot to learn. So please take my words for what they are – a naive point of view – and a starting point from my own experience. Part of the issue I think people have with older games, particularly on NES and SNES, is the often-brutal difficulty of those games, which means very few people can meaningfully engage with them without investing a ton of time, either in practicing a lot, or checking out FAQs or videos on strategy, &c. I grew up with those games and found them really difficult at the time, but it’s what we had, and as a kid, I invested a lot of time in them since I had it to spare. Now that’s not so much the case, and they are still hard as hell, even though I’m relatively familiar with them from playing them for years.

This is where emulation can be an accessibility boon. I was just talking with my spouse about this, actually. Thanks to things like save states, which can preserve the precise “state” of the emulator and take a snapshot of it, allowing one to reload at precisely that spot where they left off, a game previously meant to be finished in one sitting, with no other options (“the only way is through…”), can now be enjoyed in as many sittings as you want, or need. Super Mario Bros., which has only a rudimentary “continue” option that still requires the system to be on, and lets you start at the first level of the world you most recently ran out of lives in, was intended to be played and beaten in one sitting. Same with 2 and 3, and basically every other game on the system. The Legend of Zelda had a nice “battery-backed” save system, however, that let you save your progress, since it’s really difficult to beat that game in one sitting (although speedrunners do that all the time, it’s wild!). I was telling my spouse about how you had to hold RESET while turning the system off to save the game. I don’t entirely know why, but I’m sure there’s some technological reason for it.

In any case, emulation allows for nearly limitless save states so you can “save” your game in games where you otherwise couldn’t do that. That, in itself, is really wonderful. Emulators also let you use gamepads and remap them to your heart’s delight. Do you want the Y button on your controller to be elsewhere? Go for it if it’s more comfortable. Emulators, in particular, let you engage with games almost any way you want to, since you have control over their presentation, input mapping, and even the state of the system itself. No console maker was willing to cede that control, so ROM hackers and emulation enthusiasts found out how to emulate the systems, therefore ensuring we’re able to engage with games how we want.

So you can control the state of the system, inputs, and other factors. But how about the aspects of the game itself under the hood? The game can look as pretty as you want, sound great, and you can customize input settings, but what more? What if the game is simply too difficult in its stock version, and the difficulty levels provided (Easy, Medium, Hard, &c.), aren’t allowing you to have the best experience with it? (Side, but important note: Don’t shame people for playing in “Easy” mode, and don’t lionize people for playing “Hard” mode; we all have our preferences, but we also have our own needs, and some people need “Easy” mode for the best experience, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it doesn’t make anyone “less” of a gamer for choosing that) You’re about to throw the controller, and/or the system, at the wall since you aren’t enjoying it. And that’s unacceptable that you can’t enjoy that game.

As I mentioned, NES and SNES are some of the worst offenders when it comes to extreme difficulty, but there are also a lot of modern games that have many of the same problems. Hollow Knight is one particularly difficult game. I absolutely love it, and turned the difficulty up as much as I could bear, but it is ridiculously hard, and apparently even “easy” mode is still very, very hard. I also used a lot of FAQs and maps to find my way through the game. I like exploration as much as the next person, but some things are just too difficult to find, and that’s OK. I don’t have any shame about using FAQs, and I really appreciate people who have taken the time to create them, showing others the way and helping as much, or as little, as people like. I remember buying strategy guides for games all the time, and still have many of those. I really enjoyed Nintendo Power’s Mario Mania guide to Super Mario World, and Nintendo Power’s Super Mario 3 guide was really awesome. I still have both in a box in the garage. I also have a copy of the original BradyGames strategy guide for Final Fantasy III (III US = VI in Japan), which had a few pictures, but was really mostly walls of text in narrative form of where to go and what to do next. Sometimes that prose was hard to figure out, and I’m glad subsequent guides decided to include pictures and a little more accessible layout. Some people even shame others for using strategy guides, which I find absolutely ridiculous. Sure, you’ve got a guide and it gives you the steps, but just like a recipe, you’ve got to execute the steps yourself. Everyone needs some help sometime and there’s nothing wrong with needing help.

Again, I love Hollow Knight and games like that (Metroidvanias are great!), but they’re not easy. I really would like to see more games have adjustable difficulty, with copious toggles available, so that everyone can have the best gaming experience, and one tailored to them, as much or as little as they like. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I think one of my favorite games, Celeste, also famous for being devilishly difficult, absolutely nails the accessibility piece, at least in terms of customizability. Celeste lets you enable invulnerability, give yourself more air jumps, and other “quality-of-life” improvements that make a ton of difference. Of course, I tried not to turn these on if I could help it, but I definitely remember enabling infinite jumps somewhere near the end of the game, since I didn’t see another way to do it. And I’m a pretty “seasoned” gamer, since I’ve been playing games for a good chunk of my life, but hey, we all have our strengths and likewise things we need help with. No shame at all in using these tools, and I am really happy they’re available. I would very much like to see such fine-tuning more available in more games; there is no reason not to do that, and to intentionally design games with these principles in mind, so everyone is able to enjoy them.

I feel like I’m beginning to repeat myself now, so this is probably a good place to end. All in all, I just think that again, anyone who plays games is, by definition, a “gamer,” and don’t let anyone take that away from you. There’s room for everyone and we need to be better about making space for as many people as we can, and of course, making it as inhospitable as possible for people who seek to exclude others and tear them down.

Please share your thoughts with me, I’d love to hear them, and of course if you have suggestions on making gaming circles more inclusive, I’d love to hear them. Again, I am just speaking from my own experience and am always trying to learn more. Thanks, friends, for reading.