My sister and I were separated when I was 12 and she was 8. At first, it wasn’t an actual physical separation, but one due to the fact that our family had just moved to Korea, and in Korea, middle-school students were supposed to study until midnight. I had no time to play, let alone see my sister. When not at school or at after-school schools, I was cooped up in my room. When I turned 16, I moved to another city to attend a private high school; a few years later, when I entered college, my sister moved to the United States and we have never lived together since then. As a result, all my memories of playing games with my sister are from elementary school.
I got to know my sister all over again a few years ago, but it was strange because she was an adult, and many things had changed. We were only able to spend time together for a few days at a time, once or twice a year at most. We would meet in a third location and travel together, or visit each other. When I moved to Boston two years ago, we saw each other more frequently– perhaps once every two months.
Among the many discoveries I made about my sister, I found out that we both loved computer games. It was a pleasant surprise, though it shouldn’t have been, since we had always loved games as children and thanks to our computer scientist dad, we had always been close to computers, although we were never allowed to have an actual game console. The interesting thing, however, was that we had completely different tastes when it came to games. I loved adventure and puzzle games with surreal graphics and sci-fi plots. She liked games with cute rabbits who have big appetites. I liked Starcraft and empire-building games; she was obsessed with time-management games like Cake Mania.
Filed under: culture , plants vs zombies, gaming experience, casual games, strategic games, wall-nut
