arcade full of video games
Photo by Kyle Nieber on Unsplash

There has been a lot talk of video games lately. People saying video games make you violent. I am here to say “I don’t think so”.
I am a very nonviolent person. I am very Catholic/Franciscan , and can’t say if I have ever hurt anyone.

I have been playing video games almost my whole life.
I am in my fifties, and the first video game I played at home was pong.
I love arcades, always have. But playing a video game at home is great. Not crowd, don’t have to bring a bunch of quarters. Pong was a very early game. Pong had a few modes most were very much the same.
Then a few years later at Christmas Atari 2600. That changed everything for me. We didn’t have a lot of money, so it was family entertainment. Oh and we only had one TV and it was in my Parents room. So we usually played together as a family even my parents.
After a few weeks my Dad and I were developing Atari thumb.
After about 6 months my parents bought a small 12 or 14 inch TV for the Kitchen/Dining room. We ate in our kitchen in a small table and my parents had enough of us kids coming up at 6am to watch TV and play Atari. Because when I was a kid in the 70’s and early 80’s there were a ton of Saturday morning cartoons. So by summer of that year we had a small TV and this was the kids TV. A friend and I would take any money we could get our hands on and bike to the golf course a mile or so away and spend it on video games and a coke. We would play games like Defender, Joust, Space Invaders, Tempest and more.

As I grew older the video games got better. When I graduated high school I bought myself a commodore 64. I had a job at McDonalds and most of the money went to video games. Whenever I was at a mall, I would go to the arcade called Aladdin’s Castle. Ever since I had the Atari I would ask for games for Christmas and my birthday. Eventually I played Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation, Xbox video game systems. With the commodore 64 my love of computers started.
After my commodore 64 I bought the Commodore Amiga. It was so cool because when I would look at PC games there wasn’t much color and the Amiga had really great color and after about a year I was able to buy a Mac emulator for it. After that PC’s did color better so I bought a 386 and so on and so on.

Now we have more power in our phones than my old PC’s ever did.
I have an Xbox one and a PC that has an I7, Nvidia 1060 and a super fast SSD and a terabyte hard drive. Oddly enough my favorite games were the shooters. Doom, Quake, Unreal and more. The more violent the better it seems. Now I play Rainbow Six Siege, GTAV, Red dead redemption 2 and more. With all that video game playing you think I would be violent. Nope I’m just as chill as always. Now video games help me with my stress and help me chill out. The things that get me mad now are traffic, people not being nice and people taking advantage of others. I don’t yell or scream or anything. I just hop on to a game and the stress disappears.