Personal Narrative: Barbie Horse Adventures
As a child, I loved watching my older brother play the video games I wasn’t allowed to. This was the loophole to my parent’s rule; if I wasn’t playing the game, then I wasn’t technically misbehaving, but I could have the same experiences. I loved these games far more than any of my own, because they were far deeper and conceptually complex than, say, Barbie Horse Adventures.
I still remember the day in November 2009 that my brother got Assassin’s Creed 2. We’d shared the experience of playing the first game, but with the second installment came a whole new realm of possibility. The base concept of the first game, accessing genetic memory and synchronizing with ancestors, was clever and integrated the user well, but with the second game came
a deep, dynamic character and graphic scenery the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. I was immediately enraptured, and to this day I regard the game as one of the best I’ve had the pleasure to experience. Beyond simply sparking my interest in history, Assassin's Creed 2 revolutionized my expectations of gaming as a medium with it’s dynamic, complex world, story, and characters. The limits of what I thought gaming could achieve, and how it could impact me, were blown out of the water. I saw, for the first time, that this medium was going to become something huge.
From that young age I knew that I wanted to be a part of shaping this new digital frontier. I was inspired to develop ideas and environments with as much finesse as I’d seen in Assassin’s Creed 2. While I still view it as my favorite game of all time, the development of the industry has exposed me to new works that continue to shape my perception of gaming as a genre, and what it could feasibly become. The industry is ever evolving, and I hope that some of my ideas and visions for the future could create an experience for someone else that is equally as powerful and inspiring as the one I had as a child. With these exciting, immersive ideas, creators wield the power to alter the future of gaming, a future I aspire to have a hand in shaping.
I still remember the day in November 2009 that my brother got Assassin’s Creed 2. We’d shared the experience of playing the first game, but with the second installment came a whole new realm of possibility. The base concept of the first game, accessing genetic memory and synchronizing with ancestors, was clever and integrated the user well, but with the second game came
a deep, dynamic character and graphic scenery the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. I was immediately enraptured, and to this day I regard the game as one of the best I’ve had the pleasure to experience. Beyond simply sparking my interest in history, Assassin's Creed 2 revolutionized my expectations of gaming as a medium with it’s dynamic, complex world, story, and characters. The limits of what I thought gaming could achieve, and how it could impact me, were blown out of the water. I saw, for the first time, that this medium was going to become something huge.
From that young age I knew that I wanted to be a part of shaping this new digital frontier. I was inspired to develop ideas and environments with as much finesse as I’d seen in Assassin’s Creed 2. While I still view it as my favorite game of all time, the development of the industry has exposed me to new works that continue to shape my perception of gaming as a genre, and what it could feasibly become. The industry is ever evolving, and I hope that some of my ideas and visions for the future could create an experience for someone else that is equally as powerful and inspiring as the one I had as a child. With these exciting, immersive ideas, creators wield the power to alter the future of gaming, a future I aspire to have a hand in shaping.