The Influences of Your Upbringing on Gaming & How Your Tastes Have Changed

[Corvus]

There have been some studies showing that the music you listen to during your teenage years (M: 13-16; F: 11-14) will most likely influence your taste or be the sort of music you enjoy later in life.

Do you feel that this is also true of games?

How has your upbringing affected the sorts of games you enjoy today and how have your tastes changed over time?

The more detailed your response is, the more likely your voice will be heard and included in the Last Life podcast!

Thanks to Chariot Rider for the question!

[Fawfil]

This is definitely true, at least for me. I was raised primarily on Nintendo games, and my taste in games nowadays is mostly indie games, plus some Nintendo games from time to time. And I feel like the modern "indie" genre (if it's a genre at all, which is debatable) takes most of its influence from classic Nintendo games.

Anecdotally, I know my trajectory isn't unique: most of the people I know who are into games, with a primary interest in indie games, are people who were raised primarily on Nintendo. I would love to see more data on this.

[Mashi]

Not exactly the topic of the discussion, but games have definitely affected the type of music I listen to. Though, I suppose that's inevitable when you play rhythm games. I'm actually listening to rhythm game music right now, haha.

The games I enjoy now are primarily strategy games and rhythm games. When I was younger, I think I played a lot of sidescrollers (Mario, Kirby, Crash) and 3D adventure-like kind of games (Spyro, Kingdom Hearts, Jak and Daxter).

I think my taste in games now is vastly different from my taste in games as a kid, but I suspect that an evolution in tastes is inevitable as part of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Nowadays, I enjoy games that don't require significant time investments - that is, I can play them in frequent, short bursts. So it's probably not surprising that most games I play now are phone games and rhythm games. I don't have nearly as much free time as I do when I was younger, and I would rather optimize my time by playing games on my commute or for maybe 30 minutes at home every few days than to devote hours of my day for a game.

When I was younger, I grew up mostly playing the SNES, GBA, N64, and PS2 (I had a few others, but I don't think I played them nearly as much as these). When I was beginning college, I bought a 3DS (primarily because it was convenient for my commute!). The PS2 was my favorite system by far and it introduced to me to a ton of genres I probably never would have thought interested me (shooting/adventure games like Jak 3, the Kingdom Hearts series, the Ape Escape series, strategy games like the Disgaea series, and plenty more that don't immediately come to mind). Disgaea, I think had a particular impact on me, as it made me take on a great interest in the jRPG format of strategy games. I don't know if it kindled an interest for strategy games in general, but I'm sure it influenced it!

[Deor]

After going back and forth several times for longer than I'd like to admit on how to go about doing this, I think I'll format this by looking at specific games/series from my childhood/early teenage years and muse on how they affected my taste.

Super Mario 64
I can't talk about influences on my gaming taste without mentioning Super Mario 64. While it wasn't the first game I owned or the first game I played, it was the first to really capture my imagination and really sparked my passion for gaming in the first place. I was very young and didn't really understand how to play outside of the most basic of movement, and I don't think I ever got past the basement on my own, but that drive to explore every nook and cranny of what felt like an endless labyrinth of rooms and corridors is something I hold to this day. Thus, I tend to be drawn to games that reward such behavior.

Super Smash Bros.
I think my experience with this series later in life actually ended up having a bigger influence on my current tastes than it did back in the day, but I think Smash and Super Mario Sunshine (which I'm just going to lump in here, as it influenced me in the same way) sparked my obsession with controls. Even now I can't get over just how elegant the systems are, taking full advantage of the analogue stick in a way that I don't think I've really seen anywhere else. Simply inspirational.

Diablo II
Not only was D2 my first online multiplayer game, but really my first co-op game. Before this the only multiplayer games I'd ever played had been local PvP games like Smash Bros, Mario Kart, and GoldenEye, and while I had plenty of fun playing them, I was honestly crap at them and always lost. I didn't really hate losing, but the gloating and competitiveness of my friends and brother occasionally grated on me, and being able to hop onto Diablo and work as a team with people I'd never met online was quite cathartic. That said, I think it probably had a bigger influence on me starting to get more involved with the internet in general than with my taste in games specifically.

Paper Mario
Paper Mario really set my expectations for a JRPG, which is pretty disappointing considering that there's nothing else like it. The things I love from it and really make the game for me (low numbers, action commands, the positional system, the badge system) are innovations of the series that have mostly not spread to the rest of the genre. I legitimately believe that it ruined JRPGs for me.

Halo
Much like Paper Mario for the JRPG, the Halo (specifically Halo 1-3) games set my standard for what a multiplayer shooter should be, the primary tenets of which are even starts, movement focused combat, and a time to kill long enough to give the defender in an engagement a fighting chance. Unfortunately for me, 90% of shooters released since Call of Duty 4 came out have been built on that model, which is the polar opposite of those principals.

TES III: Morrowind
I've spent over a decade and a half chasing the Morrowind dragon to no avail. This game influenced my life in more ways than one, but as far as taste goes, Morrowind really instilled in me the importance of atmosphere and a world that feels lived in for an RPG.

I could probably go on with this, but it's currently four in the morning and I'm about ready to collapse. Thanks for listening if you managed to make it this far!