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Your Mom And Gaming
Tomorrow is Mother's Day in the US, and Newsweek's N'Gai Croal rightly estimates that many gamers owe a lot to their mothers. Because they indulged what they likely initially saw as a strange choice of hobby, we have a thriving gaming industry to enjoy today. The Level Up site offers an interview with a woman on the Newsweek staff who learned to tolerate those 'console things', and another piece where N'Gai interviews his own mom about his games-related past. "N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way." If you're still looking for a gift for your own mom, Pop Cap is giving away a free copy of Bejeweled to anyone that signs up for their newsletter. Worked on my mom. Happy Mother's Day.
a chance to tag something "yourmom". I've been waiting since high school for this :P
Monstar L
I am particularly grateful for my Mom. Instead of seeing it as an odd hobby, she saw nothing wrong with it. She could even appriciate some of the effort that went into making them. Probably because she is an art teacher. I remember hearing one of my friends mothers say, "Games are wonderful because I always have something to get him for Christmas/Birthday." Don't forget to send your mother a little something on Sunday. =)
My mom actually introduced me to video games. She was a hardcore Atari 2600 player back in her time (which she still has stuffed away in her closet with a hojillion games). When little ol' me came along, mom and I spent many-a happy afternoon playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES.
Sadly, she stopped playing some time after that. I think tomorrow I will break out Wii Sports and see if I can't get her back into it... failing that, I'll boot up Super Mario Bros. on Virtual Console and share some memories :)
...kicks ass in WoW (level 60 or something) together with her two kids (age ca. 30, level 60 or something)... and she do call herself "mom" in the game. /. :D
Parents should try to play with their kids... instead of hanging on
Of course, all those mothers out there who have just gotten into Wii games should get a copy of Cooking Mama. It's a kitchen sim of sorts, with lots of little tasks like cutting, peeling, stirring and serving food bits. Some of the recipes look pretty interesting.
Or maybe your mom should get YOU this game, to let you learn a bit more about how to feed yourself properly, and not make her do all the kitchen work!
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Forget indulging the choice of hobby, a lot of gamers owe their mom first for the 35 years of living in her basement!
The Farewell Tour II
After about 20 minutes of trying to teach my Mom to play Roger Clemen's MVP Baseball on my NES my brother and I gave up and she concluded that video games were annoying and unproductive, but ok. Thank God for that.
Haiku for you!
Lots of things flourished without the support of our mothers... like online porn.
And if you're one of the rare few whose mother encouraged your interest in porn, I really don't want to know.
Solomon
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
It's pretty sad that, like most American holidays, Mother's Day has been corrupted into a holiday that celebrates consumption and hollow platitudes rather than anything meaningful. One of the original premises of Mother's Day was a call to women worldwide to stand up against violence and war that had taken the lives of so many of their sons. It wasn't a tribute to mothers, but a rallying cry for mothers of the US to band together in a political cause to improve the world. The "mother" of Mother's Day became so disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday that she actively campaigned against it.
""N'Gai: Growing up, you allowed us kids to have a computer, but we weren't allowed to have a videogame machine. What was your thinking behind that? Yvonne Croal: Well, in my estimation at that time, videogames were just another silly game. We certainly didn't want you to be spending 24/7 playing these games that we considered not productive in any way.""
Pfft! My mother's in her 70's and computers didn't even exist. And when I came around computers were the size of a house. No way I was going to be bringing that "console" home.
plays games.
Does killing your karma like this give you bad real-life karma?
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I have a mum you insensitive clod!
Frozen bubble is a much better "free" game. But since you're all nerds.. if you're going to give a free game how about writing one yourself! and personalize it! (cuz its not about the money)
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
My mother was soo good at Chuckie Egg on the ZX Spectrum, she would eventually give up having accumulated countless numbers of extra lives, a scoreboard that have wrapped around several times, and two hungry kids who have had to fend for themselves for the 12 hours+ of non-stop playing on the game.
;-)
Still, I learnt how to cook a good meal at an early age
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. - HGTTG
Your mom likes "team play."
Maybe it's just me but I find the article to be little more than cock stroking among a peer group in effect.
"I said no to my kids playing games and now they're all well adjusted perfectly fine kids, this clearly shows that no games was what made my kids will adjusted" and then she says "It's a delight to see my kids sitting down and talking, the subject doesn't even matter". So if they all sat down and discussed Half life's plot is that some how being well adjusted and delightful, or is it suddenly evil as the topic is games?
Secondly, she points out how fantastic radio dramas are, yet the reasons she says they are good is the exact thing a good game of Nethack will give you. That little rat known as a Q is infact trying to rip your throat out, so maybe your character dodges, left, then right and finally thrusts his sword into the foul beast. Yet because the medium is different it is "clearly" some evil twisted non-imagination based thing.
Seems to me like this is just some mother going "oh my kids are great, I raised them so well!" when she has zero evidence of what happens if she had let them all watch porn all day and play games to their fill because there is only 1 chance to do it and you will never know the alternative's results.
I like muppets.
Yo mamma so fat, she can press the whole WASD key block with one finger!
I wouldn't tag it.
For the information of anyone interested in the free Bejeweled offer, apparently the offer is only good for Bejeweled Deluxe for Windows .
I was ready to jump on this offer, as my Mom adores Bejeweled. Mom, however, is a Mac user -- and it looks like Mac using Moms need to pay cash.
Mom is, of course, worth it -- but after this experience I'll probably buy her one of her other favourites (from another publisher) instead.
Yaz.
My mom was an avid gamer. She didn't pwn n00bs in Halo or anything, but she was a devoted Super Mario Bros. addict, from SMB1 through SMB Sunshine. Even before the NES, she loved Astrosmash and Burger Time for the Intellivision. And my dad thought those video games were for me and my brother...
I still miss those phone calls I used to get from her when she'd ask me how to get past a boss or particularly difficult part of the game.
Our parents bought us an Atari 2600 when we were kids; we played that thing until the colors went funky and all the controllers were broken. Even with that, they decided that the 2600 was all the game system we'd ever need, and refused to buy us anything newer. (I'd visit my NEW BEST FRIEND with the NES all the time.)
When I got my first job (at the local Kmart), I ended up taking matters into my own hands and bought an original Game Boy. When my mom saw it, she went ballistic; Why are you wasting your money on that stuff? was a common refrain.
Then she discovered Tetris.
From that moment on, any time I couldn't find my Game Boy, I knew she had taken it to play Tetris. She even hooked Dad into it. By the time I left for college, I ended up just buying another one.
They still play it to this day. I tried to give them other games, but nothing but Tetris interests them.
My mom never seemed to "get" video games most of the time, or at least the allure of them. Until... River City Ransom. For some reason, THAT was the one game that she picked up with me and would complain if I wanted to stop playing. She said she liked "beating them up and taking their lunch money" over and over.... many happy hours spent that way. Nothing before or since has captured her like that.
I wish there was a choice that said "Factually Wrong -1" when I mod.
Myst, Neverwinter Nights, Pirates, Monkey Island, King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Age of Empires, Civilization, Warlords, Heroes of Might and Magic... I could go on, but you probably get the jist of it.
My Dad also games, but he sticks to the FPS games. Unreal series is his favorite.
Maybe it's just the generation gap. I was born just a few years before the advent of video game consoles, and my parents were still young early-20's types then, and they'd played with arcade games before. They picked up an Atari 2600 for themselves, and a couple years later when I was old enough, an NES (came out when I was about 5, I think).
The next few generations are even more likely to see gamer moms. Every girl I know plays at least a few video games, and some are even bigger gaming geeks than I am (I've helped a couple ex-girlfriends build new gaming rigs better than my machine in the last few months). Gamer moms won't see so weird in a few years, I think, as the current crop of young kids will have parents who were themselves gamers as kids.
Back in the day, my favorite game was Defender for the Atari 2600. I was good. I was really good. I would routinely reach level 100. Good days, I'd hit 200. I played that game constantly. I played it so much, that I got a blister on the webbing between my thumb and index finger from moving the joystick around so much. (HEY! YOU IN THE BACK! Quit snickering!) I remember going to my mom crying because my thumb hurt, but I still wanted to play. (I was like 6 at the time.) She put a band-aid over the blister and gave me a white satin glove of hers to wear to keep the band-aid in place and to protect the rest of my hand. I still remember what she said, "There. Now you look like Michael Jackson." Bandaged up, I rejoined the fight the protect the world's cities from alien invasion.
You son, and greatful planet, thank you.
They don't even have punchlines.
My mom bought us a TRS 80 (remember those?) back in the day, that was a key start into my life in computing. She was too cheap to buy a PC when I got one in '82, so she had her brother in law, who worked for IBM, get her a discounted IBM desktop machine of some sort, whose name I can't recall. It had a tiny little 8 inch CRT, 16k of RAM, a tape drive as the only storage, and APL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(programming_lang uage)/ as an embedded language in it. It didn't do anything, and she wanted a word processor, so, she wrote one. In APL. It was pretty close the first program she ever wrote in her life. It didn't do much, opened a file, allowed you to type into it, position a cursor, etc, but I was impressed, and still am. She inspired me to try things I didn't know how to do or even try, which has been good for me.
Happy Mothers day, Mom.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
My mom is 50, and she had a World of Warcraft account, on which she got her character to level 25, before complaining of the grind. Also, she really likes Morrowind.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
Well, since she was the one who bought it I guess "stole" is the wrong word. Still, the only time I'd get a chance to play was when she was at work. :)
Get the PC registration codes, download the Mac trial, and then activate it with said codes.
I grew up with a brother in a wheelchair. When the Atari 2600 came out, I begged for one for my birthday and managed to convince my mom to get it. My bro and I played it a lot and she realized it was something he and I (and her sometimes) could do together and his being in a wheelchair wasn't an issue. Then he got an Intellivision. Man! We'd kick ass all day and night playing baseball (20-inning tied games, nobody else could touch us) and racing (we found all the little tracks between the real ones, houses, etc).
Now that the games are better, mom is more into them: Oblivian and the like. When we used to do a lot of RPG'ing, she was even a dedicated and talented GM! Beat that!!
You GO mom! Happy Mom's day!
if I had mod points this would be informative.
My mother was a programmer / geek many years before I was born. I must have been in my mid-late 20s before I was answering as many techie questions as I asked. I still remember her helping me through my first kernel re-compilation when I was 9 or 10 (should I be ashamed to admit that it was SCO unix?)
Now, at well over 60, she's still geek enough that she's an officer in an end-game raiding guild in WoW.
Now that I have kids of my own, I hope that I'm still keeping up with the latest tech in 30+ years time!
Given that my mom is the resident Legend of Zelda fanatic in our household, and the one who's always burning all the bandwidth on WoW. She did more than indulge our gaming, she participated. I got her a copy of Four Swords Adventures for Christmas and she was ecstatic. Kind of a freak, but we love her all the more.
A Sherman can give you a very nice...edge.
Alas, since my mom is very much the senior citizen, and well into her golden years, she's never managed to get into the electronic games scene (even on a computer, which she doesn't own nor has shown any interest in owning). The truth is, if I gave her an electronic game for Mother's Day, she'd think I'd lost my mind (unless there were flowers and chocolate also tucked away inside the box somewhere).
i'm not sure what exactly has been going through her head these years, but until the release of ps2/gamecube/xbox my mother purchased every major console (including saturn and dreamcast!) for me when they came out. she helped me map out dungeons in the original LoZ, helped me defuse the bombs at the dam level in TMNT, fought me for playtime on kingdom hearts 1 and 2; fought alongside me in (i can't believe i'm admitting this) the chronicles of narnia for PS2; and continues to lecture me about how my swing in super swing golf needs work, while asking me for advice on Oblivion and FF7 ('how is this supposed to be the best RPG of all time?! the characters are all blocky!' 'mom it's like.. 11 years old.' 'i liked 6 more.' 'whatever mom.') sometimes i wish she didn't, because then i would probably have a social life. then again, i'm glad she did. the sun sucks.
oh marmalade.
My mother never saw the attraction of video games when we were growing up. When I came home for Christmas last year, I showed her Wii Sports and BAM she was hooked. She spent the rest of the break taking on family, friends, neighbors, anyone she could convince to sit down for a nice casual game of bowling. I never knew Mom used to bowl in college! She was mostly disabled by a stroke three years ago and I had to hold her up so she could bowl, but she looked happier throwing strikes ("Mom, what comes after a turkey?" "A Double Turkey, silly!" *BAM*) than I've seen her in years. It was an Old Granny Hardcore moment for me -- here is my mother, the took-six-years-to-master-email types-in-ALL-CAPS never-gamed-a-day-in-her-life stroke survivor who was too busy kicking our "#$"#es
to remember she was supposed to be taking it easy.
She had Pro in bowling by the end of Christmas break, too. I think I should really get her a Wii, although what would really help is folks at home to play it with her all of the time.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Your Mom and Gaming
Two Things I did Last Night. Hi-O.
mnmnmmmthat's good satire.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games