I’ve been really liking the Blogs of the Round Table topics these past few months, so here’s yet another one I’m going to respond to. This month, Corvus is asking us to share our early experiences of playing games with our families — or alternatively, of not playing games with our families — and how they affected our approaches to gaming today.

The very first thing I should mention on this subject is that I love my family. I was raised to believe that I could do anything I wanted to, and having a doctor for a mother [1] and an engineer-turned-college teacher-turned-university administrator for a father, both of whom were immigrants to Canada, certainly helped me internalise that belief. My career-so-far in the video game industry has been met with nothing but support and encouragement, starting from that time when I was about ten years old and asked my father how video games were made, who replied by giving me a book that taught me how to program in BASIC.

That said, I never really played video games with my family.

Okay, maybe never is a bad word to use. A big chunk of my time spent playing LucasArts adventure games as a pre-teen was accompanied by my brother sitting next to me and backseat driving. And these days, my sister occasionally joins me for sessions of Rock Band. Heck, my parents even played a bit of tennis with me when I first bought my Wii. However, the bulk of my cherished gaming memories involve me alone with the computer, oblivious to the world around me, having temporarily forsaken it for an imaginary one instead. This wasn’t something my folks were always happy with, particularly when I wouldn’t answer when it was time to come to dinner or go to bed.

In other words, I was the much-maligned stereotypical isolated gamer.

But here’s the thing: it wasn’t video games that made me isolated. I did, after all, get lost in books in exactly the same way, [2] and no one complains that reading is turning kids into antisocial addicts. I’m strongly introverted, and whether that’s more a result of biology or socialisation, the fact remains that I find these moments of solitary escapism essential to my personal sanity. Thus, while I do like partaking in the occasional multiplayer thingy or two, I enjoy myself most when it’s just me and the game, with no outside distractions. Most of my family, on the other hand, falls more on the extraverted side of the spectrum, meaning I didn’t really grow up with anyone who shared my style of interaction with fiction.

Do I perceive this as a disadvantage? Far from it; the fact that gaming was “my thing” made it all the more special for me, to the point that when I decided to write my first games, and then to work professionally in the industry, I knew I was doing it for myself, rather than following in other people’s footsteps. This desire I have for differentiating myself in some way, shape, or form has been with me for as long as I can remember, and may well be a direct result of my introverted tendencies.

Would things have been different for me if I came from a family of gamers? Or, more pertinently, if I have children, will they come to love games like I do, or will they go off and find their own sets of interests? Who knows? Either way, I hope I can pass on the very same attitude that my parents instilled in me: that they can do anything that they dream of doing.