My expereince with Gaming was pretty much limited to computer games, Mostly text based adventures, and Kings Quest. My Exposure to Fantasy was likely limited to Kings Quest, This might have been after I read "The Hobbit" But I'm not sure.
I was in the 6th grade... I read a magazine article about the laberyth. The aricle was accompanied by a really lousy picture of a maze. I commented that I could design a harder maze in my sleep and proceeded to try.
Every laberyth needs a minator of course, so I added one, and then we need heroes to defeat it. So my brothers and sister got that job. I'd picked up the concept of hit points from one game or another, and I believe that was the only stat anything got. Basicly it became a game of lets pretend, but with a DM. Later a freind who played D&D introduced more RPG concepts to my game *Though I didn't know that's where it was from* and I designed something or another, using limited supplies I had, 2d6 from Monopoly, Had a great system running for a few years.
Parents of course didn't care, becuase it didn't actually say D&D which they had heard was bad, without hearing enough to know that I had basically reinvented it. Game improved greatly when I saw all the cool stuff in Wizardy on the Nintindo
As for real gaming, one day in college freinds asked me If I wanted to play D&D and I said sure why not.
My opinion of it has always been the difference between Gamers and Normals is, everyone Gamed as a kid, some of us just never stoped.