What draws you to play video games?

[the game]

Simple question. I'm sure we all got into games for different reasons. What got you interested in playing video games? When did you start playing them?


Me personally I started playing when I got my first NES back when I was a kid. I didn't talk to alot of other kids back then. I was bullied alot so video games were something I could do by myself. Eventually I met some friends who were equally into video games. Ever since then I always seemed to find myself around people who were into video games. Now that I work in the IT office at my university most of the people working there are into video games. If there's nothing else we can talk about there's always video games.

I love how video games evolved from games like pong where you're just competing for high score to games that have real story lines now.

[May90]

I was a huge reader in my childhood, I would consume books like crazy. In video games, I pretty much get an interactive book, with visuals, sounds, music, plenty of choice of action... Hardly any type of media can be more engaging!

That's as far as non-PvP games go, at any rate. I can't pinpoint what exactly I like in competitive games, but I guess there is some satisfaction from learning, getting better and overcoming challenges set by other players.

[Pull My Finger]

Not much anymore. They suck for the most part.

But there was something incredibly fascinating about them when I was I kid. I think I was drawn to them as a creative person. The whole idea of being able to come up with a self-contained world, with a senseful ruleset that determined the action, and determining in which ways the player can interactively engage with that ...

And then the decision, what do you depict and how, and what do you leave to the imagination? How do you make that visible, how do you tell a story around it? And then of course the whole auditive dimension of that. The possibilities of making something audible and enhance something with more sense or with some kind of emotion were so limited back then, and it was so interesting and intellectually educational to hear what the designers were coming up with to do that. I was really captivated by the sounds that were coming out of my old NES and SNES consoles. I'm sure that it had an influence on me and is part of why I went on to become a composer as an adult.

Games were just very fascinating to me, extremely captivating - so much creativity and engineering spirit bundled into this weird little living piece of a living world.

[Nihilist74]

I usually like to play games that allow me to imagine myself doing things that would be hard to do in real life. I play madden when I want to be an offensive coordinator and quarterback. I play wow, diablo3, or skyrim when I want to run around hacking up monsters with a battle axe. I play supreme commander when I want to build and command a large army. Ect. Sometimes I just have an itch to game something.

[I Push Buttons]

Being crippled and not being able to do much else. On the rare occasion there was something I was actually able to participate in, I was excluded by kids my age anyways.

So as a kid growing up my options were to sit around and do absolutely nothing... Or play video games. I picked video games.