Nicholas Warlin

English 1010

April 12, 2019

Stephanie Maenhardt

My History with Video Games

Video games used to rule my life. There is no bigger rush than beating a level and seeing

all the flashing lights on the screen cheering you on. It all started when my parents bought a

PlayStation 1 for my birthday when I was five years old, and it has been a part of me ever since.

I don’t even know why video games entertained me more than going outside and playing with

other children or playing football or soccer and getting good at it. At first it was an hour every

here and there, but then it grew to being more and more. I think about all the video games that

were in existence around 2002, and there weren’t very many good ones to my memory. It wasn’t

until the PlayStation 2 released and my parents bought it for me in 2005 that I became fully

intrenched in the struggle to balance video games with other aspects of my life such as spending

time with my family or going to visit my friends. I remember that my parents weren’t very

financially secure, so I didn’t own as many video games as the other kids in my neighborhood.

That’s why I started to go out and find friends, so that I could see what kind of cool games they

owned that I wasn’t even aware of. They would have games like Destroy All Humans and Halo

that I didn’t have at home because we couldn’t afford them. In this part of my life, I did go out

and play every once and a while, and I would go around to my other friends houses to hang out,

but that would slowly change.

My friends Zack and Jamie have an Xbox, which was way cooler than a PlayStation back

in the late 2000’s. I remember going over to their houses and playing Halo on the Xbox for hours
and hours until my parents would finally get upset enough with me for not being home to call.

We would have so much fun, be able to vent about what was annoying us, and just talk. I’ve

never been as relaxed as I was those days. After that, my whole night until my parents forced me

to go to bed for school in the morning would consist of playing my PlayStation, but I complained

every day about not owning an Xbox like my friends. I like to think that I played video games at

this point in my life to have an alternate way cooler virtual reality that I could escape to because

there were problems all around me. My parents would constantly fight, and I would try to drown

it out with the sounds of Jak 1,2 and 3. My school life wasn’t much better, since other kids would

make fun of me for being awkward and hanging out with the groups of friends they would all

hang out with. I didn’t grow up as a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, so that also

alienated me from most of the friend groups at school. I’m glad for this however, because it

helped me to learn who my real friends are, and my best friends today are from this period who

were also trying to escape from their reality, and I’m extremely grateful for this.

My middle school years were spent gaining friends who also had an interest in the same

video games as I did. I could tell who was cool and who wasn’t just by what we talked about all

day in class. My parents had decided that to get my next console, an Xbox 360, I had to work

hard and do chores for six months before they would cover the other half of what I needed to buy

one. This is one example of how video games ruled my life. My parents would make me get a B

or better in school, and if I didn’t, they would take away my video games for the whole summer.

I can say that it only happened once, and that I escaped to other friends’ houses to get my video

game fix. My chore money would go towards the next video game that I wanted, and I had to

work hard for them. It shames me to think that I had to be motivated to do things by holding the

removal of video games from my life over my head, but I am also thankful for this. I gained the
extreme work ethic and motivation that I contain today because I realized eventually, many years

later, that video games were only an escape. The real work comes from doing your best at

whatever you are doing now, and success will always follow.

In high school, I transferred to another school because I was having problems with the

people that I had grown up with. I had put myself in an environment where I had alienated

myself from my friends, and I felt truly alone for my first few months of school and I used a

game called League of Legends to escape from this reality. The rush of this game is that it is

hyper competitive. Your goal is, as a team of five, to destroy your enemy’s base while protecting

your own. Whoever destroyed the focal point, or Nexus, wins. I spent so much time and money

on this game. My whole sophomore year was spent going to school and yearning to play my

video game, and then going home and indulging myself for the entire rest of the day. The first

few friends I gained at my new school were also obsessed with this game. Together, we wasted

away a whole year of our lives to the computer screen. Today, I look back and wish I could take

all that time back for myself. Luckily, I had gained some friends that could tell I was in a slump

and encouraged me to join the swim team with them. Today, I can admit that this was truly the

turning point of my life. This was the first time that I found something besides video games that I

truly loved, and I am eternally grateful to my friends for this experience.

It was hard cutting back from video games for the first few months. I felt like I had to

knowingly taper myself back little by little. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be more

than worth it. I started swimming at first just to keep inside the friend group, but it became my

routine. I got up in the morning and showed up to school an hour early each day to become a

competitive swimmer. I had to modify my diet to account for all the extra energy I needed in a

day. I also went from drinking cans of soda a day to none, since water was the only thing that a
swimmer could drink to stay fit. Eventually, I stopped playing video games, and even though it

sometimes comes to bite me again, I now know that they are an escape from reality.

My personal message to anybody that has lost ahold of their life due to video games is

this. Things are not always as bad as they seem, and that you need to find a new friend group. I

found the best friend and partner of my life, and she helped me to recover after a rebound to

video games after three years of remaining free of them. She helped me to learn to appreciate the

reality that is my life, and not to waste it in a virtual world that isn’t real. I try to spend my time

in school learning, working, or enjoying my time outdoors. I learned to work on cars, I’ve read

some of my favorite literature, and spend some of my best moments with my wife. I love my

reality. Video games are an escape and aren’t worth the time they rob from you.