I had my first encounter with games on a friend's ZX Spectrum and later on an second-hand Atari 800 XL that my uncle and dad bought. A bit later I got introduced to 8bit NES at another friend's house and for a while that console set a pretty high bar for graphics fidelity. Some time later, my dad bought a second hand PC with an Intel 80286 processor and black and white CGA graphics, which started my irrevocable conversion to PCs. But there is a specific moment that I remember which happened some years later, on a 80386 PC sporting fancy VGA color graphics. There is a scene at the beginning of Éric Chahi's 1991 game Another World which made a lasting impression on me. The protagonist is at his desk in the particle accelerator lab, working on his computer when a lightning strikes the building and in an instant he is transported to the titular other world. At that moment player can control the character and emerge from a dark pool into an alien landscape.
That moment symbolizes what games mean to me personally - a portal to another world which instantly transports you there, while the real world, your surroundings, even the computer in front of you which runs the game dissolve and drift out of focus. Low fidelity graphics and sound were never really an issue. For all intents and purposes, I would truly be there, becoming the character. Games of that era were distributed on 3.5in, 1.44MB floppy disks, which created another association in my brain, that of the key. I would insert the diskette into the drive and unlock the gate to whatever wonders or horrors were within.
What I've just described could be interpreted as nothing more than escapism, but that would be just a surface level impression. My brain was looking for stimulation and challenge, my imagination was looking for food, and the added interaction and audio/visual components of the games made the whole experience exponentially more immersive. I love exploring games from various genres and I don't really have a clear preference. Each genre can satisfy a different thirst of the brain. Whether they are adventure, rpg and story driven games which play as novels and suck you into their worlds; puzzle-based, strategy and sim games which stimulate your problem solving; fps, arcade, platforming or e-sports games which challenge your reflexes; or any mix of those.
I do have a small bias towards games which are single-player and smaller in scale. I have always found games to be mostly personal experiences (except a few notable multiplayer games), and I have always felt that by stepping through that doorway into another world you are invited to explore the mind of the game's creators, with each game being a new kaleidoscope of images and sounds.
A lot of the games I have enjoyed playing drew a lot of common traits with well written books. A well made game to me is the one which shows you how to play by letting you play it, pushing you just the right amount in the direction of the solution to a particular challenge. Good game can build its world and stories through mechanics and through broad strokes and implicit detail rather than explicit hand-holding, over-explaining or verbal cut-scene exposition. I have always found fascinating how, given just a little push, our imagination could take over and fill in the rest, while keeping our brains more engaged. This is another similarity with a good book, a good game allows some room for you to interpret it in your way, making it your own as much as the author's. A well designed game can also teach you without being too blunt or preachy, and rare games can change you and the way you look at the world.
Of course, like books, not all games are good. A lot of them are forgettable, a number are really good and a few are truly brilliant. A lot of commercial games are formulaic, designed by committee, guided by trends and profit estimates, and made just to waste your time and take your money. Having mentioned our ability to fill in the world-building details given implicit bits and pieces, it is too bad that a lot games don't really respect this, instead having too firm a grasp over the player experience, providing on-rails carnival ride, instead of being more of a sandbox with assorted tools (because, on the other end of spectrum, too much freedom can also be stifling). This also applies to aesthetics of games. Just because our hardware can put out high fidelity images with millions of polygons, and just because we can overdesign every bolt and screw of the game world, it doesn't really mean we should. If we go down that route I really believe we are robbing the player of the ability to continue the worldbuilding process in their head.
Thankfully plenty of games get made each year, so the number of truly brilliant games isn't too small either. If I were to list all the games that have influenced me over the years, this post would end up being way too long. So I'll 'narrow' the choice to a (work in progress) list of some of my all time favorites. Some of the older games would certainly be considered outdated on any number of parameters of contemporary game design, but they were major stepping stones in their time. A lot of them would still hold up. And all of them certainly have the power to transport me to another world.
