Being the holidays, I thought it appropriate to write about a family-oriented topic. After all, the holiday season is traditionally the time in which we inundate our loved ones for requests for games and consoles and bizarre (to them) pieces of technology, when we hand them over Wii Remotes and laugh at their expense as they crash and burn as only the uninitiated can do. I think it’s time to give a little something back and give a nod to all those moms and wives and girlfriends and dads and grandparents and husbands and boyfriends who have a special gamer in their life, who suffer long lines and weird jargon so we can enjoy the holidays by blissfully blasting aliens or grinding up to godlike levels.

Like many gamers, I’ve always associated the holidays with two things: family and videogames. I remember all those Christmas mornings of the early 1990s, when I would sniff out NES and super NES games by the size and weight of the packages. My parents got wise to this, so they started hiding my gifts in oddly shaped boxes, but I always figured it out. Nonetheless, no matter if I knew about the game I was getting or not, opening the wrapping always came with N64 kid kid levels of excitement and joy – it was a new game, how could I not be? When other girls were busy putting Barbie and Ken in their dream house, I was happily engrossed in honing my fighter pilot skills in Star Fox, or barreling through... barrels in Donkey Kong Country. Life was good.

Later on, I remember the epic Christmas day of 1998 – in which I received The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and played through a solid half of the quest in one sitting. Relatives would come and go from the room, remarking that it looked cool. I think I scarfed down a few snowman cookies at one point to stay awake. A couple of Christmases later, I was knee-deep in Dreamcast land, and I remember my sister actually writing a (purposely humorous) narrative about how Virtua Tennis and Crazy Taxi were related, and about how games were, like, real life man!” Last year, it was all about Guitar Hero III and drunken Wii Sports, as all the relatives who happened by the TV just needed to “try that thing I saw on TV!”

The woman who orchestrated all this joy and happiness was none other than my mom – a person so stalwart in her beliefs that her kids should have a nice Christmas that she calls herself “gamer mom” from November to January. While she rarely, if ever, touches an actual controller, and she probably couldn’t tell Gears of War 2 from Combat, she’s the most hardcore gamer mom I’ve ever met. She’ll give you a rundown of current Xbox 360 SKUs and she can tell you how 720p and 1080i are different. And my lord, that woman is determined on launch day.

Gamer mom is serious about her business. On the Gamecube launch day, in 2001, she set up a three-pronged plan of attack – sending my father to one store, myself to another, and herself to a third (all at 6:00 am, mind you) in order to score a launch console. She actually drew a diagram the night before, and we hovered over it on the kitchen table, like Lieutenants following a great general into war.

She secretly suffered through the Wii launch by herself, in order to surprise me in 2006. She waited in line with a slew of 20-something guys, who she later told me proclaimed her “the coolest mom ever”. I know she wears it like a badge of honor…as well she should. She still tells her launch day tales like war stories, with a grim, knowing smile and that fierce look in her eyes.

Mom has always been an expert shopper – nothing thrills her more than getting a really good deal, and she loves a challenge (like nabbing a launch console). In a funny way, that sort of hunting instinct makes her a gamer in a very real sense – it’s strategy, it’s resource management; it’s reflexes and speed. My mother is ripe for an introduction into the world of gaming.

So this year, I’m going to try to draw mom in, at least on a friendly holiday-centered “family fun” level. As something of an expert on the casual gaming experience, I have a few games in mind to lure her in. Part of it is wanting to share a little bit of the fun – after all these years, she deserves to have a try at the things she’s waited so many hours in line for. Also, she’s pretty tech-savvy for a middle-aged woman; she’s the only mom I know that can text message with the best of them, and she’s familiar with social networking. And I know part of it is my innate gamer desire to convert another to our cause.

Since casual games have been the bread and butter of Nintendo’s mammoth success, and Microsoft’s newest target, I’ve got plenty of stuff to choose from. I’ve had a lot of luck with Boom Blox in the past (with non-gaming friends who totally kicked my ass at it), and I just know she’ll find Lego Indiana Jones cute as hell (plus she’s a huge Indy fan).

In any event, I just wanted to throw a shout out to my gamer mom, and every other gamer mom (dad, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, aunt, uncle, secret admirer, whatever) that goes out of their way to make us gamers happy. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, merry Festivus, happy Solstice, and May the Force Be With You!

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