When I was very young and in preschool I began drawing quite a lot and learned to write my name. I remember this very well and a certain teacher that believed I was some sort of artistic mastermind.
What really began my interest in video games also had to do with my interest in people. At this time, my dad crafted our first PCs at home and installed a game called Mechwarrior on on of them. We played it together almost every night (all I did was press the 'fire' button) and this sprouted my love of gaming.
The same teacher that loved my drawings encouraged me to try painting in my final year of preschool. I became obsessed from my memory and would paint every day. I don't remember being especially talented at it, or caring, but my teacher always used the paintings as an example for other kids, showing them how I took up the entire paper with colors and made a statement in some way or another through it.
In kindergarten I can still clearly picture the exercises in which I wrote the letters of the alphabet over and over until they were ingrained into my muscle memory. I also began reading, but it wasn't important to me yet, and at the time videogames were only increasing in importance to me.
This was the moment gaming sort of took over my life, and though it wasn't yet time for me to understand games and why I play them, it brought hours of enjoyment and my family very close together. Weirdly enough, much of my extended family would get together and play this game and I remember during this year's Christmas everyone was playing it together and it made me realize some of the ways in which technology unites us.
Around this period I started to use lots of handheld devices for gaming and learning. I recall a leapfrog somewhere in my life but I hated it because it always seemed too childish. I was much more fond of the Gameboy which was really the first device I realized was only interesting because I could take digital information and games anywhere.
Around this time, I started getting into books fanatically. I'd read entire series of things like Gregor the Overlander, the Warriors books, and eventually the Percy Jackson. I actually began to fully immerse myself in the storytelling of these novels and really enjoyed the idea of crafting narratives. I also became quite interested in films like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (though for some reason did not read those books).
At this point, the iPod had been out since 2001. My dad first purchased me a generic MP3 player and I never really used it. In 2008 I received an iPod touch for Christmas (my first real iPod) and I think this is when I started to become musically conscious, but somehow avoided using iTunes all these years.
Simple story. My dad made me make an AOL and I didn't use it until middle school a few years after, though I did send him, my mom, and other relatives a few messages, marking my first online interactions with other people.
I got my first cell phone when preparing to go to middle school. It had a touch screen so I thought it would be like the iPhone (which also released in 2007), but I was wrong. I was horribly wrong. It was a terrible phone, but it marked the time I began texting and communicating through the digital realm.
As my closest cousins left to live in Japan for a year, I counted down the days until their return while simultaneously making use of Skype to communicate in a much more realistic way than ever before. Though video chatting wasn't unique to Skype, it's what brought the element of vision into my digital communications.
Though I'm not proud, I am an avid Facebook user. I rarely post things, but I do browse, comment, and message through it quite a lot. That began around 8th grade and ever since I've felt like less of a human being retreating to communication through the barrier of the internet.
Once I entered high school, I was forced to actually become acquainted with Word, Powerpoint, and other Microsoft Office programs to properly do my work. It was clear to me too that my typing skills vastly increased during this period of increased use (along with my sidetracking to Facebook conversations), and I definitely became more interested in writing as a hobby through the digital realm.
The reign of social media begins. When I first stepped into the fray with Tumblr, I didn't really know what to expect. Once I'd followed enough blogs that I enjoyed, it became a pretty interesting and artsy place to spend my time, but eventually I grew to despise a lot of things about it. Twitter on the other hand, I always hated. I held out on making one all the way until my senior year because it was just so popular at my school and I still refrained from using it. For some reason the whole idea of it irritates me a lot. I think it has something to do with the lack of depth to the information that can be communicated through it, but that aside it also was shortly after the time of the Snowden and NSA scandal and I was pretty hesitant altogether with social media.
It was not until my junior year that I feel as if I truly began thinking about the meaning of things and really looked at life more analytically. I don't think I was ever unconscious of art or what was going on around me, this was just when knowledge became much more of a priority for me in general. I read some life-changing books, watched and understood film for the first time, and even began looking for this in gaming and was surprised to find intellectual and artistic elements had been there all along. I just wasn't looking for them.
DotA 2 changed my entire multiplayer gaming experience. I began to actually use the game more as a way to interact with my friends than as just a form of entertainment and I never thought I would become so fond of a group of guys just through a videogame.
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