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Sunday, April 27, 2008

All about my mother.

I've written about my mother's relationship with games a few times before, I can't quite seem to stop myself since I find her relationship with technology, and in particular video games, so fascinating.

My mother lives in Mexico, and when she comes to visit me (typically twice a year), she comes for an entire month and stays in my house. At these times, I have to go underground with my game habits, since I feel like I must convince her that I am more than a working-video-game-playing-machine (which I'm really not). It's been hard this time, since I'm in a T5 raiding guild in "the game that shall not be named", and I enjoy getting my progression on at least several nights a week.

However, it seems as of late that her relationship has vastly matured. She has had her own DS for about six months now, and when she first arrived back in the United States, one of her first acts was to purchase THREE games for her hand-me-down system. Okay granted, the games she bought were My Spanish Coach, Brain Age 2, and some poker game, but I consider that progress.

And for the past three weeks, she has been obsessing about purchasing a Wii. So today when we finally found one in stock, she's in the middle of the store jumping up and down screaming "I've got a Wii". It was really entertaining. And of course, right on cue, she had to announce to half of the employees there that I work at Electronic Arts and own a million video games.

I talked about that a little bit in my recent Warhammer Developer bio and I have to admit it has been one of the more interesting aspects of watching my mother evolve with video games. She always supported me playing them (in moderation), after all this is the woman responsible for the Odyssey 2 that I acquired at the tender age of 4, but she has more recently embraced them and the industry so completely, that I guess I don't really have to hide what I do from her anymore.

So I showed her one of my raids on my undead priest and how I was grouped with 24 other real people, and how we're trying to take down this big boss, and how we communicate on Ventrilo to coordinate our attacks. And she turns to me and says, "So...how are you both evil and holy, isn't that an oxymoron?". And I tell you, she got me there, folks. I'm sure there's background story to explain it, but it was that I hadn't even thought about it, and that she could help me look at games in a different way. Well I suppose that has been the most interesting thing of all.

10 comments:

Milkman519 said...

Ah, mothers...I was just yelling at mine while I was reading this actually. =P

Unknown said...

"... and a little number called Circuit Breakers."

You are a bad person.

Anonymous said...

Hahaha! I totally forgot to tell you about that.

Unknown said...

That's pretty rad. If Nintendo dominates the market and eventually just assimilates every human being on the planet, a at least they will have got moms and grandmas gaming. That's quite the accomplishment.

Unknown said...

"So...how are you both evil and holy, isn't that an oxymoron?" She was paying attention. That's very cool.

You're still playing that game? Wow! Just wow.

Anonymous said...

So when Warhammer comes out, will EA force you to abandon Mystery Game and switch over to it? It would probably not be a good signal if the game's programmers were playing its biggest competitor instead.

Damn lucky with your mom. I tried to get mine to play Wii Sports, but it completely failed to grab her interest. Maybe she'll care about Wii Fit, but I'm not hopeful.

Anonymous said...

You can be evil and holy! and I'm not talking about priests that like little boys a little too much.

It's all about your creed and relegion. For example; If the undead had a relegion, then presumably there can also be an undead priest. Devil worshipers have churches and priests too. That might be an unholy union to you and me, but it certainly isn't to them.

Mothers FTW!

Keoni Chavez said...

What is it you're doing for Warhammer, exactly? Are you available for an interview for Massively.com?

Anonymous said...

I am responsible for the User Interface and the Tome of Knowledge, and sure I can do interviews (Massively recently posted a very nice Warhammer article, actually...) But it would have to be okayed by the marketing department, first. Do you know how to contact them?

Keoni Chavez said...

Not yet, I don't, but I'll see about getting on that! Massively as a whole is practically salivating over WAR, and having you talk about your work (what you can, at any rate) would be fantastic!