Blogs of the Round Table: I Cannot Survive Without a Little Help From My Friends

As far back as I can remember games for me have always been a communal, social experience. I can tell you that my earliest memories involving video games have to do with my older cousin bringing his NES with him during the holidays, or the days of tall-tale telling around a library copy of Cosmic Osmo, or the trading of tips and floppy-based save games for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, but nowhere, I think, is my dependence on social interaction for game playing as apparent as it is when it comes to difficult challenges in games.

I've admitted before that I generally know my own horizon of gaming skills seems pretty near compared to many people that I know and meet. In some ways this has contributed to my generally broad knowledge of gaming as a whole, as my easy frustrations early in so many games have left me all the more eager to move on to many, many more games.

For most genres, if I have beaten a game, it was in tandem with friends. Even games that I haven't beaten I never would have seen as much as I did if it were not for my family and my friends. My brother and one of my sisters and I spent a few weeks in a "Star competition" in the same save game of Super Mario 64. Soon after that we spent a summer attempting to beat Rayman 2 by sharing a single controller and deciding whose skills best matched which zones. One of my skills at that time turned out to be a decent mastery of the game's underwater mechanics. My sister and brother ...