I played my first video game. It was amazing.
As an adult woman with goals and responsibilities and relationships, I used to feel that I had missed the golden age for getting into gaming. When I was younger, I loved fantasy books and sighed with longing whenever I saw my cousin playing Skyrim. However, no one in my house owned a console, and I lacked the initiative to save up for one. I had little interest in the first-person shooter games that were so popular among my classmates. Apart from the occasional four-day-long binge of The Sims, I had resigned myself to the fact that games weren’t really for me.
All of this changed when, in the midst of a stressful international move last year, my husband introduced me to Breath of the Wild. In hindsight, this was probably the best possible game I could have picked up (see this video for a good breakdown of why). Although my fingers felt clumsy on our Nintendo Switch at first, I’ll never forget the delight of realizing that I could interact with pretty much any object I wanted. I remember walking over to a glassy pool in the beginner sandbox, thinking to myself, could I swim in that? I could! And there’s a fish too. Could I catch it? I could!
Gaming added a surprising number of benefits to my life. Exploring every corner of the map in BOTW got me through many evenings and weekends in lockdown. I initially ran away from pretty much every…
