Outside Stimulus Creating Extrema in Gamers

Now, say the title 10 times, fast. Anyway, to the topic.

A while back, I wrote this on omgmygame when we where attempting to start a coup trying to put the site together. In the small article I wrote about "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Sibling Gaming" (ironically enough that was the title). After rereading the article, I realized that having a brother has greatly affected games I can and cannot enjoy. Often the first thing I'll test out in a game, is it's multiplayer, because as a kid that is what was most important to me and my brother, how we could both share the game and play together. This probably explains my purchasing of all the Call of Duty games (post four) because the game has become "the" 1st person shooter to play online among me and my friends.

This got me wondering, do any fellow EoFFers think they can think back to their first experiences with video games and possibly reason out why they love the games the love now? Or perhaps explain other gaming habits?

For me being the youngest I always had to game with a sibling early on. We'd have mario battles and my brother would always steal all the lives :mad2: But that competition of "well i have to beat this game first!" or "He can't kill me!" made me want to play more.

But because of siblings i'm so use to being second player that I mess up when i'm first.

My first experiences with games were handing of the controller back and forth with my younger brother playing Super Mario World and Donkey Cong Country. The first game I was serious about was FFVII when I was 11. My little brother scratched all my CDs up and I didn't let him touch another game of mine until he was 20.

My first experiences with gaming were taking turns playing Duck Hunt and Super Mario. Bros on the NES with my dad. Since neither of those have real multiplayer, I guess maybe it conditioned me to always look for a strong campaign/story experience above a multiplayer one.