Today this post made hackernews top 10. I guess it has to do with the fact that a lot of readers have the experience of blowing into the Nintendo cartridges before.
I blew several of them too.
I was lucky, as my parents would buy me the “Nintendo game console”. Well technically, it was called “小霸王学习机” at that time and was intended to help kids learning. As learning is always a good excuse for playing (“Mom, I need to buy a walkman to learn English”), it turned out most of the time, the machine was used to play games. At that time, a game cartridge was really expensive: one 8-in-1 cartridge (yeah, pirated, I know) almost cost 100 yuan, about the same amount of the console itself. It turned out as a kid, you could only owned up to 3 or 4 game cartridges. Sure it sounds sad, but on the other hand, every game was treated as “Contra” or “Super Mario”. We played hard and found fun.
Fast forward to today, people have access to more games and more consoles. Thanks for people who cracking games and consoles (PS3, wii, psp, xbox), it’s very easy to grab a game from tpb, burn to a disk, or even just transfer to a hard drive, play for a while and find boring. (well I am describing the process, which doesn’t necessarily mean I’m doing it or I did that)
The fact is, it’s not the game is not fun, it’s the people who playing it couldn’t find the fun. Games are too easy to get/own, and if you are used to live in this “fast food” world, you will treat them as fast food. You always want to play it quickly, you always want to upgrade to full xp/mp quickly, you always want to see the end, you always want to try the next game. It’ll be quick to find out you have already owned all the games you “like”, but which one do you really like?
Probably the next one.
Time is fast, life is fast, but do take it slow. Treasure what you have, and enjoy the moment.