When I was a kid I was playing video games on my NES and Sega Genesis alongside the rest of my friends whose parents couldn’t afford or didn’t understand computers. The absence of this new advent provided a sort of innocence via ignorance. There was no Internet. The digital media blitz that kicked in toward the end of the 90s and has only intensified since then was beyond comprehension. There was simply TV, video games, and playing outside. We had little and enjoyed it.
I sat down to talk to my fourteen year-old brother about six months ago. There’s a fourteen year gap between the two of us and my interaction with him is usually limited to talk about video games, updates on his classes, and advice on how to handle the teenage shit we all had to deal with.
He’s fifteen now. A quiet, reserved kid. Moody as any kid that age.
I asked him a vital question: “Do you have Skyrim?”
“Yea, Cris [another brother of ours] bought it. But he won’t open it. He doesn’t want to play it yet because he has a bunch of other games to finish.”
“Well, don’t you want to play it?”
“Kind of. But I just, like, watched most of it on Youtube because I couldn’t wait.”
“Oh. So you’ve watched the whole game?”
“Yea, pretty much.”
A travesty. Watch a video game online? What about the experience of enjoying it? The memories of playing through a difficult dungeon or saving a traveler out in the countryside? To me, it was the equivalent of skipping a great book to watch the shitty film.
I bought him a copy anyway.
I have to wonder if I would’ve watched something like, say, a video game playthrough channel on TV when I was a kid. Just sit there and watch all the video games I couldn’t play. We did buy plenty of video game magazines, but they were different from outright watching a playthrough on Youtube. They just revealed tidbits and mentioned the good parts. The experience of playing the game was still reserved for one person and perhaps some friends to experience on their own. If we didn’t own a copy of it or our parents didn’t want to buy it, then we had to wait. And wait.
And maybe, someday, we’d get to play it.