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.