I had a complicated relationship with video games when I was a teenager. I had straightforwardly, wholeheartedly loved the Nintendo games that I’d grown up with, tumbling around primary-coloured dreamscapes in Super Mario 64 and having the time of my life. But as I grew into a pretentious young adult in the early 00s, I started to want more from games, and I wasn’t finding it. So many of them were mindless, or juvenile, or needlessly violent. So few seemed to have anything to say. I started to wonder whether games might really be a waste of time, like the judgy adults in my life kept telling me.
My response to this was to relentlessly intellectualise the games I played, in order to justify the time and attention I was expending on them. I mainlined highbrow gaming magazines and wrote grandiose blogs about serious adult themes in Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid and the ancient Fallout computer games. My childhood love of Nintendo, with its bright hues and unselfconscious approach to play, felt embarrassing. Then I switched on The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and had a realisation about the nature and importance of play that would shape my life.
