Steven+Schaber+Memoir

Mr. Steven M. Schaber Editor Amy Reed Wednesday, January 20 th, 2010 Dr. Renee Hobbs Week 1: Media in my Childhood Nestled Away Gaming Growing up as the youngest child of three, I can call to mind a particular experience in my childhood that involved video games. In my early childhood I was a lonely gamer. As I advanced in public school I learned to include my peers, and finally, I achieved both peer video gaming and online video gaming.

As an illustration, it was Christmas morning of my early childhood, and it was the kind of weather that made you thankful to be inside. Under our conifer tree were three small wrapped presents ; one was jungle green, one was fire engine red, and one was cool ranch blue. My brothers and I peeled back the paper immediately to reveal three video games. We thanked Santa Claus, and ran upstairs with our new Sega Genesis; excited to play Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I remember watching my older brothers play with the two controllers we owned. They would make me wait for my turn while I watched them play. When they had gotten bored, they gave me the controller which was still warm from their excited hands. They left me alone in a big room with a small television and a black game system. The room grew colder, and quieter.

In essence, the routine of having to wait for my turn, then playing in a silent room over the span of time in such an impressionable age, conditioned me. Video games became something that the older crowd did whenever they wanted to have fun; to the youngest child, video games conveyed growing up. In my eyes, being able to play video games when I wanted to play them symbolized being in control.

Correspondingly, after years of conditioning I developed in two major ways. I usually played video games alone, and I usually played video games for extended periods of time. On occasion I would play hours of video games after dinner, and into the night. It started to become the comfortable thing to do. I would build a nest to sit in while the game was loading. When the game was ready, I sat at my comfortable gaming station and played past the point of content. By the time I was finished with my game my nest had been soiled with my bodies essential oils, and scents. In sixth grade, I met a shy boy at lunch and after talking, we discovered that we had the same passion for the same video games. This was the moment I developed from a lonely gamer to a peer gamer. I went over to his house, and together we played countless hours of computer and Playstation games. His mother would bring us dinner as we became absorbed into the screens of his basement. This was a gaming relationship that lasted a year, because sometimes I’d want to go outside and he would refuse.

Comparatively, in seventh grade, I met a boy just like me. He liked video games so much more than I did, and we shared a common interest in the same genre in gaming. This was actually the moment I took my ways of peer gaming to online gaming. Our routine was that we would play video games at his house until my parents had to pick me up. After I arrived home, I would sign on to [|Battle.net], and we would continue playing via the internet. In this way we forged an unforgettable friendship.

This friendship is exactly the kind of social interaction that Sonia Livingstone is talking about in her book, “Young People and New Media” when she says, “...far from finding that teenagers are turned by computer games into lonely, isolated addicts unable to communicate with each other, it seems that teenagers are incorporating new media into their peer networks, using both face-to-face and online communication, visiting each others’ houses to talk about and play computer games just as they visited and swapped comics a generation before, using new media to supplement rather than displace existing activities.” (Livingstone, 2002, 7) According to Livingstone, I was a lonely computer game player. Then as I grew up with video games I introduced them into my peer network. Sleepovers were dedicated to video games; I was a social video game player that forged vivid memories, inside jokes, and past times into unique friendships.

Works Cited // Livingstone, New media and young people //. (2002). London: Sage.