When I was seventeen, I first encountered the computer game Adventure. It involves going down into a cave and bringing back precious metals and stuff, and coming across trolls and monsters. There's also a pair of complicated mazes. Later, when I was 25 and we bought a home computer, we also got Bureaucracy, a game written by the great Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) where at one point you have no cash but have to eat in a cash-only restaurant, then the only thing you can do is sneak out. (That happened to Adams in real life.)
In my mid-30s, when we bought a Compaq desktop, they threw in "The Princeless Bride," the seventh in the King's Quest series of fairy tale-themed games. Aficionados say the earlier games were better, but I liked it anyway. It's about a mother and teenage daughter looking for each other in a magical kingdom where you touch objects with a wand and often do nice things for people. I liked the mother: while her daughter's looking for adventure and romance, she just wants to find the girl, save the magic kingdom from an unstable volcano and go home.
Today I prefer computer games that involve building and long-term strategy, along the lines of Sim City. There are a couple I'm just now playing on Facebook. One's called Tribez and Castlez [sic] and involves, uh, building castles. The other is Forge of Empires and is about developing your community's technology from the Stone Age to the 21st century. I've just entered the Industrial Age!
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