I AM NOT A GAMER. I don't have any video games on my computer, in my house, or on my phone, except for the version of mahjong that ships with Windows 7, which I play in dark moments on plane trips. 

But I wish I were a gamer. Because I remember how good it was.

 In 1989, when Nintendo was new, only my upstairs neighbor Brock had it. He was an older kid, pretty unpleasant; he liked to toss his hamster through his laundry basketball hoop for fun and once destroyed this amethyst geode I had when he pushed me into a bookshelf. 

But I played Nintendo with Brock whenever I could. Any unpleasantness was worth it for Super Mario Brothers. My eight-year-old brain was absolutely sure that it was as much of a beautiful encapsulation of the human condition as the Narnia books or The Phantom Toolbooth. 

I stopped playing games in high school, when Doom became the rage. I wasn't interested in 3D real-time environments where enemies tried to kill me -- that was what high school already was. 

 So my game experience involves a very specific, classic period that was immortalized by the Scott Pilgrim movie. (And, Disney hopes, by Wreck-It Ralph.) Call it the sub-20-bit period. Here's what it taught me:

1. A creative direction not to take.

I never just played video games. I always designed them. On graph paper. With mechanical pencils. I finished Super Mario and tried to invent my own game like that, Desert Jumper. (It wasn't terribly original.) What I discovered was that in order to design a video game, I had to actually learn how to program a computer, and that was a lot more difficult than writing a story. The technical barriers of game creation turned me toward writing.

2. The thrill of victory.

 You never win watching television. I used to watch a lot of it -- all the Saturday morning cartoons, from 5:30am to Pee-Wee's Playhouse -- and when I finished, I always had a weird sick feeling, like I was wasting my life, plus dizziness. But if I played hours and hours of a video game and won, I felt like an adult.

3. The importance of a princess.

 It was nuts how many games involved a princess. Not just Mario, but Zelda, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon... in the more modern games it was a "girlfriend" instead of a "princess." Even if you saved the world, it didn't matter if you didn't find love. I remembered that when I started writing.

 The first generation of gamers are now making movies, writing for television, and writing books. I'm one of them; my young adult novel The Other Normals is about a kid in summer camp who falls into a fantasy world based on his favorite game.  

Here are my favorite books about gaming for young adults and those who used to be them.

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• Interstellar Pig by William Sleator (YA)

• Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card (YA)

• Extra Lives by Tom Bissel (non-fiction)

• Glory Season by David Brin (SF)

• Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World by David Sheff (non-fiction)

• Fantasy Freaks & Gaming Geeks by Ethan Gilsdorf (non-fiction)

• Of Dice and Men: The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and The People Who Play It by David M Ewalt (May 2013) (non-fiction)