Technology

I’m now a born-again gamer, and loving it

My generation didn’t grow up with games involving microchips, a likely factor. And I was like a lot of girls and women in disliking the majority of titles

A gaming arcade in Denver, Colorado, in 1983. Photograph: The Denver Post

Karlin Lillington's face
Karlin Lillington
Thu Jan 11 2024 - 06:00

In the 1980s, just as the new phenomenon of digital arcade games was taking off, I was fresh out of university, living in a small Californian town and working in the local hardware store.

A games centre opened across the road, filled with the new upright arcade consoles, featuring fresh excitements such as Galaga, Asteroids, Centipede, and my favourite, Ms Pac-Man.

If you signed up to become an arcade member, you’d get an extra free game token for every dollar spent. The place was filled almost exclusively with pre-teen boys, and, on our breaks and lunches, me and my friend and fellow employee, Lisa.

We were usually the only females, and most definitely the oldest players there, standing among the waist-height boys blowing their allowances on Asteroids (how they must have envied us with our grown-up paycheques, which could pay for days upon days of Galaga).

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Our initials regularly featured on the console high-score rankings, particularly for Centipede. Yet, I never went on to buy handheld game consoles. And, until recently, I never embraced games on computers, with the sole exception of Myst.

Released in 1993, Myst was a gaming phenomenon and one of the first successes on the then-new CD-ROM format. Widely considered one of the best games of all time, it sold six million copies and was the top-selling game for an entire decade. It broke gaming gender and age barriers, appealing to women as well as older people. (I eventually interviewed Myst’s creators a few times, the brothers Robyn and Rand Miller.)

To kick off the new year, I’m here to encourage you to give games a try, too, if you’d thought they offered little to you

I’ve no idea why I ignored games. My generation didn’t grow up with games involving microchips, a likely factor. And I was like a lot of girls and women in disliking the majority of titles.

I didn’t mind shooting pixelated triangular spaceships in Asteroids, but I hated the evolution of “shooter” games into gorefests between muscular characters toting outlandish weapons.

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I didn’t like “dying”. I’m sensitive to motion and found anything requiring speedy driving, running or flying made me queasy. Handheld game controllers were confusing as well. What a gaming loser I was.

Then last year, I read a tweet recommending Agent A, a little game that was on sale on something called GOG for under €2. So cheap – what could I lose? I bought it and enjoyed many hours on my laptop, solving various challenges. It took me four times longer than what GOG listed as the average play time, but so what? I’m still learning basic gaming norms and actions.

Agent A re-opened a door into gaming that had been shut for 30 years. That got me looking at other games and tentatively exploring formats. Because the big industry role-playing games (RPGs), “shooters”, action and sports games dominate the games advertising world, I’d never considered exploring what else might be out there. Doh! Now I regularly get new games.

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For me, that’s meant puzzle, mystery, narrative, platformer (where you climb, leap or fly up through different levels), retro and action games that don’t involve spattering blood everywhere or moving about at a (literally) dizzying pace. Some are achingly beautiful, especially games from smaller, independent studios.

To kick off the new year, I’m here to encourage you to give games a try, too, if you’d thought they offered little to you. The easiest way to get on board is to create an account on GOG (for Good Old Games) and/or on Steam.

These are the two main gaming stores and digital distribution platforms and have thousands of games, Steam far more than GOG but GOG is less commercial and offers its games free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions and you own them for life.

Games I’ve fallen in love with include the very beautiful Gris, Journey, and Far: Lone Sails, any of which will likely change your notion of what a game can be. I’ve also loved the quirky duo of Creaks and Machinarium

Both regularly have big sales, so you can dabble for little outlay. You can see whether a game works on Windows, Mac or consoles and get critic and user ratings. Once you buy a game it pops into your collection. You can then download it to your PC, Mac or device, and play. You can generally use the keyboard controls or a game controller (like an Xbox or PlayStation controller, or VR, if that format’s offered).

Games I’ve fallen in love with include the very beautiful Gris, Journey, and Far: Lone Sails, any of which will likely change your notion of what a game can be. I’ve also loved the quirky duo of Creaks and Machinarium.

And do try the 30th anniversary edition of Myst, released in 2021 and updated to today’s visual capabilities.

Now that so many of the RPGs let you roam their vast digital worlds without having to actually go kill things, I plan on getting back on to our Xbox. And who knows, maybe I’ll finally get adept enough with a games controller to actually play those games.

I think I’ll put that on my list of new year’s resolutions. I hope one of yours might be to explore gaming, even if you thought it, or particular genres within it, weren’t for you. Like me, I’ll bet you’ll enjoy discovering they are.

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