Gateway Gaming: Converting the Non-Gamers

My nephew. My (mumbling) years old mom are converted gamers. Someone put the thought in my head and I’ve been thinking about how we are introduced to gaming and more specifically how we introduce others into our ranks.

My nephew was a bit of an experiment for me, I confess. As a young elementary school kid, he wasn’t as into reading as he was into playing and his mom was frustrated about how to make reading on his own more fun for him. I asked her to let me have him for a weekend. My nephew was at an age where monsters and swords were very cool.

So cool Auntie that I am, I babysat him and introduced him to a Final Fantasy game. He loved the gameplay right away and the depth of the story captured him as I explained who he was, what was happening all the cool stuff he could do. He played and I read the text for him initially then at a certain point during the weekend I stopped reading and he started to read out loud for us, and asked questions when he felt stuck. He picked up pretty fast though and over the next months I encouraged him to play once homework and chores were done, as did his mother once she noticed how much reading he needed to do to play this game. Within eight months his reading scores and comprehension in classes went way, way up and he was saving his allowance to buy his own system and another role-playing game.

It is now many years later. My nephew, who is now in his first year of college and has a very healthy social life is a gamer. He is very adept with survival horror and action adventures – but his heart always belongs to role-playing games and Final Fantasy is something we both love and share.

My mother is a more recent convert. She would tell you for many years that she is NOT a gamer. Asking her to play a PC or videogame a while back was tantamount to asking if she’d like to jog through Death Valley in July while wearing a wool coat. But I’m tenacious and determined. She would recognize her gamer side - she just had to be shown.

I believe if you like any sort of game, you are already predisposed to electronic gaming it just takes patience and attention to determine which aspects that you like are found in other games. And my mom likes card games like Hearts, Spades, Poker and Pinochle. Board games like Backgammon, Scrabble or Chess. She likes Uno and casino games. She likes to be challenged and she likes to play to win.

I started easy with my mom and I won’t lie, she has been a couple of years to turn. She had a computer, so I showed her the electronic scrabble and chess games first and emphasized the freedom to play at any time with the bonus challenge of the computer opponent if not a real one. She liked them. I then introduced her to electronic hearts and solitaire games. She liked that too. I then purchased a casino game for her that had slots, poker, roulette, craps. She played that until she decided she needed to go to the real casino ‘cause she was just that good.

That’s when I introduced her to a few online gaming sites like Pogo and Yahoo games. She now plays a variety of games there and I’ll tell you she is a sweetheart to talk with and fun to play, but the woman is a shark. You go on these services and play with some nice lady with a happy faced hello? Don’t be fooled. She is there to win.

She doesn’t know it, but the next step is to introduce her to some of the XBOX arcade games that I think she will enjoy. My goal is for her to want her own XBOX system so we can play head to head. Then my goal for her is complete – but truth be told she is already there. She knows now she is a gamer.

Consider the people in your life: maybe you are thinking of your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, significant other, good friend, cousin, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, parents, boss or neighbor. If they already like other types of games, then I think it’s easier to show them why electronic games are a passion for you and could be fun for them – the door is already ajar.

It’s the true non-gamers, the ones who think games are still for children, get flustered and embarrassed if they play and do poorly or just don’t know how to “play” that are more daunting to turn. But I believe if you can first talk with them and find the common ground of their interests or a need that can be exploited - that is your key to finding a gateway game that can bring them into understanding if not into our ranks. Do they like puzzles? Do they need stress release? Are they into music? Do they like stories? Do they have a job where they feel powerless and would like to make more decisions? This is not being sneaky, it is listening and offering the right fit for him or her. It takes a willingness to invest time and your patience. It takes offering positive encouragement. It takes accepting that gaming may never be as important to them as it is to you or I. But it can lead to so many wonderful new shared experiences or discussions and a new appreciation for this as a form of entertainment.

I think it is worth the try. Don't you?

Think that I am off base? Are there complexities I haven’t considered? Am I on target? Do you define gamer differently? Have you been turned from non-gaming to gaming – how? Have you turned someone else into a gamer or revealed him/her as a gamer to him/herself? Let me know!

And thanks for looking!