Narrative Essay about Playing Video Games

Life is like a video game, everyone has a different storyline. Mine is my life long addiction to video games. When I play, I am almost always better than anyone against me. Playing video games makes me feel free, as if I am inside the video game controlling each line of code. Every time I take damage, I can feel my heart hammering inside my chest as I figure out what to do next. Every time I do damage, I feel the adrenaline rushing through me, and every time I win, I feel a sense of accomplishment. Every time my parents yell, “Dinner!” I become cold as reality comes crashing down upon me.

Ever since I was a kid, I have played video games. It has been the center of my life. When I was six, I got a Nintendo Wii and I played Mario Kart against other people globally. Even though I was just six, I was among the top 200 best players globally.  When I was nine, I got a Nintendo 3DS. I started playing a newer version of Mario Kart against my friends, and I crushed them. One day while I was playing a game, my character managed to glitch into the map and got stuck. The only way to get unstuck was to leave the game, which would have caused me to lose placement points. This moment sparked my interest in video game designing and coding.

Since then, I have taken various coding programs from colleges and online programs including one from Harvard University during the summer of 2020. While I was taking this online course, I quickly learned that designing and coding video games is a lot harder than I thought. One typo can create hundreds of errors, which can quickly overwhelm the user. It also taught me the sheer complexity of even a very simple video game. When working on my final project (which was a ball rolling down a hill), I had to use Blender, a free graphic designing software, to make a red ball. Blender is one of the most complex animating and modeling softwares that takes years to master, and all I wanted to use it for was to make a simple red ball. After I spent around four to five weeks making the ball and then another two weeks coloring it, I found out that there was a button that automatically makes a ball. All I had to do was specify the color, diameter, and texture. Four weeks of learning just to find out that there was a button that could solve my problem in four minutes. 

Unfortunately, not everything has a simple button. When I had to code using C# to make the ball roll, I quickly realized that I needed to know more than just the basics of this language. I had to learn almost half of C# in just two weeks. Through dedication and perseverance, I learned what I needed to know to make the ball roll down the hill. This wouldn't have happened without my love for video games.

Not only do I love getting better at video games, but I also love to improve myself. During my sophomore year, I was falling behind on one of my classes. This class had a test coming up in just a few days, and after realizing just how much this test would affected my GPA, I started asking more questions and began completing more practice problems. I was the only one who stayed after school to make sure that I had the answers to my questions. When test time came around, I got one of the highest scores in my class.

That year I learned to not underestimate myself. As I began to find confidence in myself, I gradually became better at doing what I love doing, and always try to improve on myself as much as possible.