I started gaming when I was 5 years old. My first game was Pokémon yellow. Many things have changed in my life through the years, but my love for gaming has stayed. I still get amazed by video games. It’s amazing that you can put a disk in a box and it pops up as moving pictures on another box THAT YOU CAN CONTROL. It had intricacies that I will never understand, like the human brain. One of my favorite games is dark souls. I love it its brutal, unforgiving difficulty. If I’m being honest, my game of life sometimes feels as hard as dark souls, but in dark souls when I was facing Ornstein and Smough after two days of nonstop dying to them I decided to take a break and turn of the console. I didn’t come back for a few days and then I turned my console back on and figured out how to beat them. I can’t do that with real life. Like when I was battling that boss depression. Yeah, I could go do other stuff, but I know to continue on with life at some point I would have to go and beat the boss, because it’s looming presence was always there. My other option was to turn it off and end life there, but with life there is no coming back later. It’s not as simple as turning the console back on and picking up right back where you left off. I can’t blow into any cartridge hoping I would work again. There is no back-up save files, checkpoints to return to, or even a home screen where I can start again. In video games though, death doesn’t really mean anything. Ya it can ****, but you come back and keep on going. This is where video games as an art show their true beauty at least to me. In games I see reasons to live. Not saying I’m alive because of games. However, games show me things such as a beautiful world with lots to accomplish, fun adventures the main character gets to go on, wonderful romance situations that can bring a tear to your eye, friends that you can trust and are always there for; things like these that I sometimes forget are in my game too. I then realize there is so much left to my game, and one day my system will turn off for good, but there is no reason I should be the one to hit the power button.