When I started playing games I was a kid barely out of diapers in a dark basement somewhere in Indiana playing Super Mario Bros. I always used that image of my childhood self as the archetype for the gaming scene in the 80s and 90s. Maybe not the diapers part, but the kid playing videogames in a basement seemed to be what the stereotype was. Everyone I’d met who played games had pretty much the same story as me.

Over the past decade, however, I’ve found an increasing number of people whose first experiences with games have been drastically different than mine. I know a few “bros” who never played games much before Halo made its way into their dorm room, I know a woman whose first gaming addiction came when my best friend married her and shared his WoW addiction, and I have personally sold a pair of Wii systems to an engaged couple who never played games before and a household of college girls who spent almost as much time playing with the system at parties as they spent drinking (almost).

And then there’s my mom. When did the world become a place where I am playing videogames with, and losing to, my own mother?

To further illustrate the wackness of this situation let me tell you that my mom looks like she was taken straight out of one of Nintendo’s Wii target audience stock photos. She’s a very Mexican 4′10″ Sexagenarian with a lot of white hair and a bad case of engrish. Her exposure to videogames for most of her life was typically limited to one of three situations: A)Navigating the arcade when it came time to pick me and my brothers up from the mall, B)Yelling at me for playing games all day when she wanted to watch her stories, and C)Hiding consoles when I refused to do my homework/clean my room/go to bed. I’m sure the enumeration of these scenarios brings back very specific memories for a number you reading this, but then again, the point of this post is the fact that there is also a lot of you who never experienced these moments. So, anyway, one Christmas I have the extended family playing the recently launched Nintendo Wii and, as the market researchers at Nintendo would have predicted, it was a hit. But for none so much as it was for my mom. She had developed an addiction to the bowling game in Wii Sports. For weeks she played as the Mii I created in her likeness and every day for at least an hour she’d stand in our parlor working on her average. I’d often challenge her to a few games and I’d often lose and as my mind continually reeled at the trauma of losing to my own mother at a video game she’d keep on playing for another three sets or so.

A few years ago I lived in Louisana with fellow 4CR Staffer William Zhang. I was an inexperienced little puke at the time and in desperate need of a job, but luckily he knew somebody who knew somebody and eventually I ended up working a cushy job as a porter for a local bowling alley. I retrieved balls and pins from the gutters, I fixed the ever-breaking arcade machines, and I cleaned the toilets. It was fantastic. Anyway, my other friend/coworker Michael and I couldn’t shutup about the tremendous joy we were drawing from the recently launched Nintendo Wii and one night after the alley had closed we hooked it up to the big screen TV in the bar and invited anyone else who was working to stay and enjoy it with us. Of the dozen people who played that night perhaps only three or four had ever played a video game before and everyone there was waiting in line for their next turn. We were IN a bowling alley and yet everyone was crowded around the big screen waiting for their turn at virtual bowling. Two engaged coworkers of mine came up to me as they were leaving and informed me that they would be picking up their own Wii that week. Of course, they didn’t realize that they had just gotten in the back of a line that was months ahead of them, but eventually they acquired their very own system.

Another set of people present at that shindig was this group of girls who shared an apartment in the building next door to mine. After their first experience with the Wii they started to invite me to get-togethers at their place. The deal was that they’d bring the booze and I’d bring the entertainment ( ). I’m sure more lascivious persons would have seen this as an opportunity to pursue the typical activities associated with the college crowd, but we all had tremendous amounts of fun simply with our drinking and Wii playing. Hell, the alcohol wasn’t even necessary since long after its effects faded many of us continued our competitive tennis playing. By the time I moved away at the end of that semester they had all already made up their minds to get a Wii as well.

I was going to close this post with a vignette about my friend and his wife being addicted to WoW together, but then I received a message from a friend of mine who I knew from back when I lived in Indiana. After the initial several minutes of “oh hey, I haven’t talked to you in a decade… how are you?” awkwardness we realized we both still play videogames. In the course of the following conversation I mentioned to him, apparently unconvincingly, that I’m not into Pokemon cards anymore and he said to me that there’s no need to be ashamed because he and his wife play a lot of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl together. I suppose that while my mom and a large sum of other people are newly developing markets within the gaming community, us old-time addicts are still around too. We’re just getting married and stuff.

So any of you notice this same thing? I’m sure you guys have some pretty good stories about unexpected gamers.