A life without preconceptions about games

August 7, 2021

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Although as time goes on certain prejudices about games increasingly fade into the background, there are still stigmas surrounding our beloved hobby. Thinking back, I can count myself lucky that I have never run into this in my own life. In fact: I have not been put in the way to fully enjoy my passion.

I may be an exception, although I hear Please share your experiences in the comments below this column. Although I have been surrounded by many people in the 37 years that I have been on this planet who knew nothing about computer games, I have always been free to play games, read about them and eventually write about them.

That started with my parents. Certainly in the 80s and 90s, many parents were completely unfamiliar with the then relatively new phenomenon. You can’t charge them for that either: they simply didn’t grow up with it, just like I don’t understand – or want to understand – what’s great about TikTok, or watch someone else play a game on the internet. Of course there are always exceptions to the rule, but my parents really didn’t know anything about video games, except that I wanted a Nintendo Entertainment System to play Mario.

They made that possible. I’ll spare you the exact details, because I’ve already covered them in detail in another column, but without having to beg or beg for it, an NES was humming under the television on my eighth birthday. Because not just Super Mario Bros. can play, every so often – especially with my birthdays and Sinterklaas – I received a new game.

More importantly, I was never asked to ‘stop playing those games’. I wasn’t told I would get square eyes, I wasn’t kicked out of the house because playing outside would be healthier and there were no time limits. As a result, I was able to estimate perfectly well when things got too crazy: because there was no illogical taboo on the activity, I often enough alternated my virtual trips on my own initiative with adventures in the open air or appointments with friends – with or without a bunch of controllers in our hand.

That’s for the roughly 23 years that I lived in my parental home never changed. New consoles arrived at the Musters house on holidays – the Super NES, the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 – and I was allowed to spend as much free time with them as I thought necessary. When I helped with the potato harvest on my father’s farm in my teens, it was no problem to spend the extra pocket money I earned on new games. In fact: between the arrival of carts loaded with potatoes in the yard, I played several games. For example, games like the first Rayman, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time will forever remain inextricably linked to the memories of picking up clods between the bintjes.

I am very grateful to my parents for that freedom and their gift to watch games without prejudice

Even as I got older, nothing ever stood in the way of enjoying games. My first serious girlfriend actually liked games. We took turns playing Grand Theft Auto 3 – having fun driving around and playing the criminal and not handing over the controller until you got busted – and guided her through her first Zelda game in the form of Ocarina of Time. When I ran my first game site of my own, she let me spend a significant portion of my free time on it without murmuring. She was also on the corresponding forum.

During my studies there was a slightly greater lack of knowledge among teachers, but never understanding. As a graduation project during my multimedia design education, I made a digital game magazine that could be browsed on the computer. With that I passed.

Op the subsequent journalistic training I had to fight a little harder to present game journalism as legitimate work. The teachers initially expressed doubts about my mission to enter this field, but after my internship at Gamer.nl – and my graduation project, which again was about games – they were convinced. I will not claim that I have single-handedly destroyed the prejudices about game journalism in schools, but I think it has become a bit more accepted by now to say that you are doing an internship in a game editor.

As I said in the intro to this column: I am very lucky. I also knew friends who were only allowed to play games at our house – secretly – or who could spend the money better at home. And what about the many misunderstandings that many parents still have about the gaming behavior of their children? What about violence in games, and are games not addictive?

There is so much ignorance and you can’t necessarily blame people for that: knowledge and acceptance about these kinds of things has to grow within society, slowly but surely, year after year. Hopefully it will do that now that the generation that grew up with games already has some kids walking around. And don’t forget that the above doubts are not entirely without reason. One child is not the other and as a parent you can best estimate whether your child is sensitive to addictions or violence.

The best thing you can do as a parent is to take a legitimate interest in your child’s hobby. Play a game! I remember when my father would come to my bedroom to play a game of Street Fighter 2: Turbo with me. He probably didn’t like it, but he recognized my hobby and did his best to understand why I loved it so much. You can’t give your child a better feeling.

Every Saturday a column appears on Gamer.nl that discusses current events.

A life without preconceptions about games

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