I saw the Overrated Games thread and I was going to post this here, but then it got way off topic from that and decided it should be its own thread instead. This is basically how games affected my life. Nothing really more than that.
Halo, I was 6 years old and I didn't care about map design (First time I was truly exposed to video games). That got me playing all kinds of games until my mom got scared that I was going to hurt someone (when really I wasn't, just her being overly paranoid). Flash forward to 2005 when I was first exposed to Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and Doom 3. All 3 of those games challenged me in some way. Half-Life 2 taught me to look at the details and to respect a story. Far Cry taught me to keep going no matter how hard something is or the conditions you are put in. And Doom 3; it taught me to not be scared at anything that came around the corner. That even if I was scared of what was next, I still had to move forward. Also, these games got me into computers and working with scripts and later into programming.
This was in a period where I was 8 to 11 years old. I was smarter than my dad was at scripting and I always thought of him as smarter than me. There were a lot of ways my dad was a horrible one but if he didn't let me sneak video games I probably wouldn't be here right now. My mom thought she was helping me by cutting me off from video games when honestly, I'd probably be dead right now if my dad wouldn't have been there. At that age, I was an adrenaline junkie, a bully, and many more bad things. Problem was, I was way more of an adrenaline junkie then most people. At age 9 I got myself in an accident (it was entirely my fault) so bad I could've been paralyzed from the waist down, but I was lucky. I still have leg problems today. A year before that I had nearly cut my little toe off. I was in a very bad direction and was put into therapy. My therapist didn't do crap, he didn't help me, I would barely talk to him.
I told my mom I was sneaking video games at my dad's when I was 12. She cut me off from him. At 11 I was at an all time high in my life. At 12, I fell into a depression and contemplated and attempted suicide. Contributing to that was the fact that I had just come to the realization my grandparents had died (they died when I was 8). This wasn't because video games were distracting me. This was because for the first time somebody else was gone. My best friend moved out of state. Apparently he wanted to tell me goodbye before he left but alas, I was not able to go. Again, it was my mother being too sheltering. I had nothing, he was practically my only friend mostly because I drove the others away. I attempted suicide and failed. Luckily my parents never found out or I would've inpatient at a mental health hospital for a 4th time. Oh yeah, did I mention I had all F's at the time.
Finally, I was allowed to see my dad again, when I was 13. My problems started to go away. Fast, extremely fast in fact. My dad went from being a horrible parent to a god awful one and somehow, that made me all the better. He was a pissed off wreck and somehow because of that, it made me so much better. I was smarter than my mom on all aspects when I was 13. My stepdad when I was 15. I'm 16 now and am trying to figure out what I want to do in my life. I am in 2 college courses and am trying to decide whether I should become a physicist, an IT worker, a game designer, or go into the business field. Apparently each one of those are very reachable careers for me and I could probably do even more difficult things.
Right now at both parents' house I have free reign over what games I play and I am better than ever. I still play video games often and I can look back on my good moments when I was younger and I realize how capable I was back then and if I had video games all this time, I have no clue where I would be right now. I mean, when I was 11 I was modding games, albeit they weren't very good but they were better than most adults could do.
PS: I don't know if those ages are entirely correct. My memory is spotty from all of the things I have done (I can't remember my entire 5th or 6th grade years.
TL;DR: Video games shaped my life.
