I was a lucky kid, as far as gaming goes. My dad worked in the distribution side of “the industry,” so from a young age, I always had neat stuff around. You know that much if you’ve read my biography on the Staff page. But there’s a lot you can’t get from those paragraphs, and they all have to do with being a sort of homegrown gamer.

Why do I call it being “homegrown”? It wasn’t really an accident. It came mostly from being around my dad. He planted the seeds, as far as I know. He claims it wasn’t intentional, just a byproduct of his job, and I tend to agree. He got pretty good discounts on games through work, and so we were able to have more of them than most people.

He started small with me, since I was small, so I had a small task: Pressing a single button on our Mac’s keyboard while my dad played basketball. At first, he told me when, then, as my hand-eye coordination got a little better, I got to decide. I was three.

This is Baby Gamer me, not a Full House character, as some have suspected.

We eventually moved up to bigger and better things: A vintage Atari that couldn’t read every game we gave it, but could read a lot of them. When I was five, I got my very own Sega Genesis and started playing everything given to me. Even Joe Montana Football, even though I couldn’t understand why I never won.

One of my favorite games for that system was Mortal Kombat. I didn’t know this at the time, but that game in particular was the center of a ton of discussion about the emergence of violence in video games. This inspired a sit-down talk between my dad and I. “Honey, you know this isn’t real and that you shouldn’t go off and beat up people, right?” “Duh, Dad.”

So, that was that. We kept playing together, eventually moved on to the Sega CD (including that Mortal Kombat version, which was unedited and therefore earned an MA-17 rating), and our mutual hobby continued.

But then, it happened. Divorce. Sadness, depression, moving away. The first thing my mother did was take away my much-loved Mortal Kombat disc. She said I couldn’t play it again until I was 13. So, it was back to a world of nothing but games that were technically appropriate for my age group. My mom would play two things: Columns, and Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure. (But let’s not lie, Tiny Toons was arguably the awesomest cartoon outside of Animaniacs.) We would play together most nights, just like my dad and I had.

To think that this started an obsession.

However, that changed pretty soon. For whatever reason, my mom started telling me that I was too old and that I was going to just plain get tired of video games soon. Then, the Sega CD broke, and I had to go without for quite a while. (Yeah, in the great scheme of things, it wasn’t so bad, but I was still really sad about it.) I remember hearing that gaming was just something girls “didn’t do.” (Mom was always concerned that I was doing things that girls shouldn’t.) But I kept going.

I eventually got a PlayStation, and my dad got me something that would change the way I thought about games: A copy of the original Tomb Raider. I played that for months. My mom got me Tomb Raider 3. I ate those up. I moved on to JRPGs. I played them constantly. A few weeks of my eighth-grade existence consisted of me staying up until 3 a.m. trying to finish Final Fantasy VIII.

My mom...secret lover of Rapture?

That period of time is, I think, when I started making my own gaming decisions. I went to the store, decided what I wanted, and then begged for them during appropriate holidays. I was lucky yet again, because I usually got them.

That period of time is also when my mom started playing less and less. Before, I think she was making an effort to join me and my dad’s special gaming club. But now, she had full custody of me and didn’t need to try. Either that, or she thought there were too many buttons. I personally wouldn’t be surprised if it was both.

I’ve gotten more consoles since then, but the dynamic seems to have shifted a bit. Whereas my dad was once really into gaming…well, now…not as much. Sure, he’s got a PS3, and games to go with it, but he never seems to actually use it that much. Something about not having any time, I think. My mom’s attitude towards me being a gamer has also shifted. Now, she sees them as something I do that she can also enjoy, but only as if she’s watching a movie. The last time I brought my PS3 to her house, I gave her a choice of games to watch – either BioShock, Tomb Raider Underworld (she’s come to love Lara almost as much as me), or LittleBigPlanet.

She surprised me that day, and picked BioShock. Based on plot alone, she said, it seemed the most interesting (and really, who wouldn’t agree with that). So she watched me play for a couple of hours that night and inundated me with questions. She also listened intently to my ramblings about Portal and how awesome it was and how it worked. I never would have expected that, either.

I got another surprise later: She said she wanted to buy a Wii. Yet another thing I would never have expected, but maybe she’s warming up to gaming a little bit more now, she’s seen that the controller has fewer buttons, or she just knows there are exercise games for it. Either way, I’m happy to get games back into her house. We started out as a gaming family, and I want it to be that way once more. I thought my mom once didn’t want me to play, but the truth probably was that she just didn’t know what to do with me! (Lesson learned, I think.)

People keep asking me if I’m going to raise any daughters I have to be gamers. I have to think that I’m going to at least try, but I do hope they want to, since that’s the most important thing. I’ll give them the seeds – but my girls will decide what gets to take root.