Jinked

I’ve always identified as a gamer, even over the past couple years as my game time has significantly waned. I’ll sit down once in awhile with a console game, slogging through dungeons and saving distant worlds. I just don’t do it as much as I did in college and high school. Still, video games played an integral role in shaping me into the person I am today. I owe a lot to them. A lot of good things.

We live in a time where people look to video games as the cause for all undesirable behavior. School shootings, suicides, violent crimes, social incompetence… if video games were found somewhere in the perpetrator’s past then video games had to be to blame. There’s a stigma attached to gaming; it isn’t just violence. Delinquents. The socially inept. Nerds that can’t get girlfriends. Losers. The list can go on and on and on. It sucks that we as a society always have to focus on the negative. The positive doesn’t seem to matter as much.

But the positive does matter! Every year around the holidays I donate to the Child’s Play Charity, which is an awesome gamer’s charity. In their words:

Since 2003, over 100,000 gamers worldwide have banded together through Child’s Play, a community based charity grown and nurtured from the game culture and industry. Over 5 million dollars in donations of toys, games, books and cash for sick kids in children’s hospitals across North America and the world have been collected since our inception.

I’ve never been hospitalized overnight, let alone weeks, months or years at a time. However, during some dark times in my life when I felt very “sick” I turned to video games for comfort. I didn’t see them as a solution to my problems, or entirely as a route to escape. What they did do was help me come to terms with who I am and was, and showed me in some round-about ways what I had to do to get better. Video games were a light, a source of joy in an otherwise bleak time for me.

They helped cultivate my creativity. They further instilled my passion for music. They helped me make new friends who would later help me discover important aspects of myself and grow into the woman I am today. They did a lot for me… and they do a lot for other people.

Video games aren’t the enemy. In fact, they help bring together the caring, giving community of gamers all over the world. Child’s Play Charity and The Speed Gamers and other small, close-knit communities, they all do things to make a difference in the name of die-hard gamers everywhere. Thanks guys. You make me proud to call myself a gamer.

I think I’ll go play a video game now.