Family Bonding

No video games for the girls this week. Anne's sick with the flu and Jaclyn isn't here, so for the first time in a long time I decided to play the Super Nintendo by myself. I put Donkey Kong 3 into the system, started a new file, and immediately my mind fills with childhood memories.

Video games have been quite prevalent throughout my life. When I was younger, perhaps only 4 or 5, I can remember sitting on the floor of my living room playing the Super Nintendo with my sister and my parents. We would play the competition version of the game where instead of playing as a team, we would play against each other. My mother and I would represent one team and my sister and my father would play as the other team.

I could be wrong, but if memory serves me right, I'm pretty close to positive that my mother and I reigned on high as the victorious team. Elizabeth and my father may have won every once in a while, but my mother and I were often times the winners. I wasn't allowed to brag though. It was one of the rules.

       Rule #1: No bragging when you win. It's rude and it's not a good way to make friends.
      
       Rule #2: No fighting.

       Rule #3: No getting upset if you're having trouble with something. It's only a video game.

       Rule #4: No being a sore loser.

I didn't always follow the final rule.

Looking at the rules again, I realize that Anne and Jaclyn break all four rules every time they play together.

Even nowadays, I often times find myself stressing out over a world I can't seem to win or a boss I can't seem to defeat. I let my dissatisfaction with my efforts consume me and become enraged over a stupid little video game. This is when I have to step back and remember those four little rules. The first two rules don't seem to apply to me anymore because I rarely play games with a partner. The last two rules though, they are often difficult for me to follow when I'm stressed out and begin a video game that I may have difficulty with.

Whenever I find myself stressed out over a game, I take myself back to my childhood, sitting next to Elizabeth on the floor, playing video games with my parents. Especially when playing the Super Nintendo, I can feel the warmth of family memories which help to ease my mind.

It was never about the video games themselves when I was little, at least not to my parents. Elizabeth and I spent most of our time outside playing with the neighbors. As soon as the dark hit and our parents called us inside, it became family bonding time. I was too young to understand most family boardgames, so my parents turned to Mario or Donkey Kong on the Super Nintendo to entertain us. We would talk about our days and just spend family time together, one of the reasons I believe we are such a closely knit family.

The living room became our escape from the outside world. It was our sanctuary at night, saving us from the dark or the rain; the only things that seemed to be evil when I was younger. I used to look forward to our video game nights, and these days, I still do. My parents never graduated their video game skills when the Nintendo64 gaming system became popular. The same went for the Nintendo Game Cube. But the Nintendo Wii changed our family dynamic, taking a family that seemed to be slowly growing apart as my siblings and I grew up and pushing them back together.