Tutorial Island

“If gaming were seen as an art, the important question would be not whether games were good for us, but whether they are good, full stop.”

— Naomi Alderman.

For those of you that play Old School Runescape, or when I started it was just Runescape, you always start on Tutorial Island. A little haven safe from threats where you can practice your first try at all the skills of the game. I’d like to consider my first post a bit like this Island. Safe from the threats of messing up. Like many of you, video games are a fantastic form of escape. We become a hero, someone new and travels somewhere a long long time ago in a galaxy far far away or maybe somewhere that could only be found in the deepest parts of our imagination. We travel to amazing places and have incredible adventures, fight insurmountable obstacles head on with unwavering courage, especially after taking a moment to save first, you know, just in case. In the end we are victorious. When we look up from the controller our reality seems a little more manageable. A lot less intimidating. I know that’s how video games started for me. My brother and I got our first console, a PS1 slim, when I was around 6 and he around 5. Our first game was Spyro: Year of the Dragon. Still hands down my absolute favorite game. It was simple. A little dragon and his firefly companion travel to all these realms saving dragon eggs from a witch. We played this game for ages together. Solving puzzles and defeating the bosses. To this day I only look back at those times fondly. I don’t see them as wasted hours in front of a screen, but as a time of camaraderie with my brother. Now my brother and I are quite close and remain so, despite the fact that I live 3000 miles away from him, through the online games we play together. Now the gaming industry and community has changed tons since my PS1 days and games have much more complexity and facets than a simple story game they used to be and I look forward to exploring that a bit more in coming posts. They’ll probably be a bit less sappy then this post, but hey its my first post so I felt it would be good to start where it all started for me and its my blog, so I can do what I want. Until next time. GG.