Here at RF Generation, I've become very comfortable with the group of relatively active members on the forums, and have enjoyed reading all the various blog posts and articles that come out most every day.  I'm not a big reader, so I count it a plus that I can snack on these bite-size morsels of text to get a little bit of a vicarious gaming fix. Sometimes I take them in while on a short break at work or in the evening as I wind down for the day, when I have only a few minutes to spare before heading to dreamland and not enough time to ACTUALLY play a game.  It is with some anticipation that I look forward to new articles on the site, and am checking every 2 or 3 days to see who has new blog posts, and what new information said posts may hold for me.  Truth be told, I've become a minor addict to the RF Generation blogs.

Having said that, I have found a number of articles to be very informative and inspirational.  In particular, I found a recent article by RF Generation member 'slackur' to be very inspirational.  He wrote about culling a large collection of games, but in a purposeful manner, in hopes of sharing that collection with friends, family, and coworkers, as a means of extending the life of those games, and to keep many of them from languishing on the shelves.  Indeed, it made me long for the days of early adulthood, when I lived in a bigger city, and could easily find a half dozen people within a stone's throw who would want to come over and play video games with me.  Where do the years go?  But, I digress.  In my more aged state, I find myself in a small town, surrounded by farmers and ranchers whose gaming experiences are all but a thing of the past.  I'm a relatively lone gamer in a sea of non-gamers.



And yet, my ever growing collection needed to be shared, so I combined my passion for gaming with my passion to start a family.  Sadly, my wife and I are unable to conceive a child of our own.  After over 18 years of marriage, and having done foster care for nearly 7 years without any of our foster kids ever being fully adoptable, we are moving toward an infant adoption.  For anyone who hasn't gone down that road, let me just say, "adoption is horribly expensive!"  Part of getting the money together, for anyone who doesn't have a nest egg, is fundraising.  What better way to leverage my collection than to hold a gaming party?

My wife actually came up with the idea, and while we billed it as a "family gaming night," to be complete with board games, card games, and video games, my focus was solely on the latter.  I scared up several TV's (including some of my own), got permission to use our church building for an evening, and went about setting up the TV's, game systems, and everything.  It was a long process, and quite the job, especially considering the number of CRT's we set up for older game systems.  We invited the whole church and community to come celebrate with us, and just asked anyone who wanted to participate for a free-will donation.  Charging admission just seemed like a bad idea.


Unfortunately, the turnout wasn't what we hoped for, but that doesn't mean we didn't have a lot of fun!  We had some kids from the church come out, a couple friends, and my brother brought his kids up to hang out as well.  We served snacks, had good conversations, and played loads of games.  In total, I had five TVs set up in the church sanctuary, and set up one of the church's TVs in a classroom.  In total, I set up nine game systems: the NES, Sega Genesis, Super NES, N64, PlayStation, Game Cube, PS2, PS3, and Wii U.  The Wii U got the most use of the night, with multiple kids playing cooperatively on several games.  They really had a blast, and it was fun watching them playing and enjoying themselves.  There was some interest in the retro gaming side as well, with players going after Super Mario Bros, as well as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario World, and also some Star Wars Rogue Squadron: Rebel Strike.  The PS2 and PS3 didn't get used, nor did the Genesis (or rather, my JVC X'Eye), and the original PlayStation didn't power on, other than when I was testing the connection, but I still felt good about having the systems hooked up, and the large contingent of games I made available from my collection.  A good time was had by all.

In any event, I wanted to share the experience and say that if I, as an introvert, can run a game night and invite people, anyone can!  While we didn't have nearly the number of people we wanted, it proved to me that I could pull it off.  I hope to organize another one sometime in the winter, when there aren't a large number of outdoor activities for people to do. Folks will be glad to come in from the snow to a warm cup of hot chocolate, and the warm glow of a CRT with an old familiar game to play.  If I can get a better response from the next event, I hope to do something on an even larger scale that will be more community-wide, even if it turns out to be something other than a fundraiser.  I'm just glad I had the opportunity to do something like this, and now that I can share it with all of you.

Here are a few more pictures I took at the event:

Permalink | Comments [7] | Digg This Article | Tweet