Thread: I know I talk about my love for gaming a lot and how I'm doing my best to fight against censorship in gaming, but to the best of my knowledge I can't remember explaining WHY I am a gamer and why it means so much to me. This thread is about telling my story as a #gamer.

As far back as I can remember, which is about 3 years old, I always had health problems. My father had finished his two tours in Vietnam and was stationed in Bremerhaven Germany at a Red Cross base as a dietary chef. I remember being 4 years old and always having severe asthma.

My asthma was so bad that I remember my father carrying me on his back to see a doctor and always getting breathing treatments. It was so bad I wasn't able to have stuffed animals or any toys that collected dust easily. Naturally, going out to play was problematic.

My dad bought me my first console which was an Atari 2600. It was a way for me to play as well as a way for my parents to keep an eye on me and make sure I was safe. Asthma was a huge problem for me all throughout my school years. Even after we moved to NC when by dad left the

service, I still pretty much had to be an indoors kid. Thankfully it got better as I got older and I was able to walk to school and play outside, but any sort of sports were completely off the table for me. Gaming was always there for me. I remember getting the original Nintendo.

From Nintendo, to Super NIntendo, to Sega Genesis, games were always there for me. My school life was hard because I was such a weak kid. Nobody wanted me to play with them because there was a few times when I tried to run and I would collapse unable to breath.

When my parent's spit up when I was thirteen and I moved to Illinois with my dad was pretty much the first time I ever had to live without my games and It pretty much sucked. My grandmother was one of those bible thumping hypocrites so no gaming allowed.

... then came 3 years of foster care and more time not being able to game and not being able to relate to anyone that wasn't a gamer like I was. I had always been able to kind of live inside myself and explore the world through games and books and TV. Being social was a mystery.

Anyway, to make a really long and boring story even shorter, all those years of gaming seemed like a necessity for me. I did it, but it's not something I did for love or passion. That didn't happen 'till the Playstation came out and Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII blew up

Metal Gear Solid, to a lot of gamers, was the one that was the vision of the future to come in gaming and that was when I really fell in love, and FFVII just made it even worse. Ever since then I have never been able to stop. I've always been searching for those stories that

touched me just as deeply as any book or movie ever did. Believe my, I loved to read, but when games started being interactive 50-100+ stories, that was it for me. I would never get enough.

To me gaming has never been about fighting or violence or blowing things up.

It's being able to put myself in the middle of incredible virtual worlds and experiencing things from the perspective of others, doing things I could never do in real life. I mean I'm 43 now and my asthma is pretty much a thing of the past, and I learned how to be social.

I could have a lot of friends or play sports if I wanted to, and honestly I tried, but I never got the same feelings that I did when exploring virtual worlds. If that makes me a nerd or a geek, whatever, that's fine with me, all I know is that I am happy and that's what counts.

So to end this thread I guess I'll say that gamers can be a really weird group of people. We argue and bicker about the dumbest shit sometimes, but at the end of the day, we are all gamers and we are united by that. I love my fellow gamers even if I can't stand them at times.

.... except for mobile gamers. Fuck those guys.

End Thread.