The Beginning
I was born in the year 2000. My introduction to gaming was spearheaded by systems like the GameCube, Wii, and PlayStation 3. However, one gaming experience remained constant as these systems rose and fell in popularity. This, of course, is my experience of gaming on the shared family computer.
I can still remember what the home setup looked like. A silver HP tower circa 2006, a blue-black Logitech modem and router, a black LG monitor. My memories of this time are vivid, being so deeply rooted in my formative years. Playing on the shared PC is something I look back on now very fondly. No, I don’t think it’s a case of being blinded by nostalgia. The games I was into were great, and the time spent playing them was important.
The Circumstances
Those who experienced communal gaming through the family computer know how or why this came to be. Coming out of the 90s, personal computers were still steeply-priced. They became a more common fixture in homes compared to when they arrived, but still expensive. Laptops were just as pricey, and many only had one provided through their job (if at all). Thus, one computer did all the heavy lifting to suit everyone’s needs. Games were played, bills were paid, and many school assignments were completed on them.
The practice of buying one computer for a household is also reflective of family size in the west, too. Today, American and Canadian families are generally smaller than in the early 2000s. Instead of having two or more kids, many families now only raise a single child. In a world of rising living costs and grocery shrinkflation, it’s not hard to see why.
The Early Years
As a youngin’, I was caught up in the Webkinz craze. Buying a stuffed animal that provided entry into an online virtual world? Whoever patented that idea was a genius. Kids were provided a physical item to collect and play with, and also sunk many hours into the game. Kids in elementary school would bring their Webkinz along for the commute, comparing collections with friends.
Also tied to my elementary school years were various flash games. Pardon my old man opinion, but the kids today know nothing about this! Sites like Newgrounds, Notdoppler, and Shockwave had me in a stranglehold. Flash games were free, easy to access, and purely entertaining. Some of them were so good that I remember waiting all day at school to get home and play Redline Rumble or Burnin’ Rubber.
The Early Years, Continued
Synonymous with early 2000s PC gaming, is the CD-ROM. My family’s CD-ROM rack was chock full of different plastic and cardboard game cases. My older sister dominated the space with Nancy Drew, but also Sims and its countless expansions. I, on the other hand, had my Hot Wheels and Matchbox mainstays. I even had a few games thrown in there from cereal boxes. One game that united my sister and I, though, was Rollercoaster Tycoon 2.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 opened me up to the building and management genre. I’d sit there for hours watching my sister build her theme park, in awe. Its graphics, albeit simple, were satisfying to look at. Its creative options, including a custom roller coaster constructor, were magnificent. I can only guess at how many hours I spent sitting at the communal computer desk. Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, which I played years later, never hit quite the same as its predecessor.
The Online Explosion
As I entered grades four and five in 2010-11, online gaming was experiencing a boom. Like the aforementioned flash games, there was a plethora of free-to-play content. However, the games that arrived in this era were full-on virtual worlds. These include titles like Toontown, FreeRealms, Pirates of the Caribbean Online, Clone Wars Adventures, and Wizard101. I played them all.
It was MMOs like these that got me really immersed in questing, as well as player home design. The open-world aspect of these also pushed me towards games like Skyrim and Fallout in later years. Compared to my friends at the time, I was the most invested in free PC MMOs. Nearly all of them had Xbox 360s, and I went the PlayStation route. With that in mind, I made friends on other games to play with!
The Online Explosion, Continued
As I became a pre-teen and sought more mature themes, I got pulled to EA’s Battlefield Play4free and Need For Speed World. More free-to-play titles, and different genres. I remember a time of playing Battlefield Play4free and talking on Teamspeak. My friend Lucas and I went hardcore for what was essentially a freemium Battlefield 2. It goes without saying that this game really got me into shooters, but the Battlefield franchise specifically. When Battlefield 4 came out in 2013, I was hooked.
Battlefield Play4free’s time in my rotation is significant because it transitioned with me as I got my first laptop. It also became defunct shortly after I got my own laptop. Yes, its 2011-2015 reign is truly a tragic tale. Perhaps it was poetic, marking the end of my time on the family PC.
Changing Times
As I moved well into my teens, the household computer dynamic shifted greatly. The concept of a central computer used by all was left in the past. My sister, who once shared early gaming experiences with me, left for university. Everyone in my four-person family had their own laptop by the time I was in middle school. Time online was no longer measured in turns but was instead readily available.
This shift didn’t make gaming unenjoyable for me, but it definitely marked the beginning of my adolescence. With every family member in their own computer ‘silo’, I was freer than ever before to play. That said, I think the shift is probably somewhat similar to the decline of classic arcades. Something about gaming was lost when playing time wasn’t both shared and scarce. Technology becoming readily available to each family member took some of the magic away. Feeling this as an adult is hilarious because as a kid, I wished more than anything to have my own computer.
My Conclusions
I wrote this article to reminisce on what seems like a bygone era of gaming. Sure, people still share a family computer. That said, it seems like the practice has dwindled in recent years. Entry-level laptops and PCs have become cheaper and easier to obtain. Kids nowadays seem to be more likely to have various devices for their own use. In my day, you made the most of every second on the family desktop. Your turn on the keyboard was a finite amount of time!
The family computer era was special to me because it’s inherently tied to the innocence of my childhood. Whether it was a flash game or a free-to-play MMO, these experiences helped shape my gaming preferences. Consciously and subconsciously, I search for games today that can rekindle that same magic, or scratch that same itch. A lot of gamers may forget the impact of the shared PC tower, but I’m keenly aware of it.
