Due to a lot of the deals, recently, the gaming backlog at my house has jumped by about 22 games. Realistically, I won’t be needing to buy any games for a very long time (which is nice, b/c my wife won’t let me anyway). But my (12yo) son was talking about how he’s not sure what game to play next and it occured to me: his childhood gaming experience is going to be so drastically different from mine.
When I was a kid, with my NES and then, eventually, my SNES, I was lucky if I got three games in a year. Normally, I’d get one on my birthday, maybe, and one for Christmas. Luckily, I had friends I could borrow from (something else that doesn’t seem to happen quite as much these days as when I was a kid) and they, in turn, could borrow from me. There wasn’t this need to get the same game that my friend had. It was quite the opposite: if my friend had a game, I didn’t NEED to get it; I could just borrow his.
My kids, however, have (to my knowledge) never borrowed games from their friends. It just seems like it’s something that isn’t done. With the huge number of titles coming out and the speed at which they do, the shiny new object of the month is often replaced before the month is even over. Ninety-nine Nights, for instance… my son played the demo when it came out and loved the gameplay. Talked about it for weeks… kept saying he was going to save up for it. But then something else came about before he got it and he lost sight of it. I just bought the game, used, from GS for about $6. He was glad to get it, but he’s not going to be playing it right away. He’s still working through the LOTR: Conquest I grabbed from EAStore.com for $3.
And that’s my point, I guess… finishing a game and having to CHOOSE which of the MANY games you want to play next was such an alien notion to me as a child, it would have seemed mad to even suggest it could happen. Now, though, my kids have so many games that they don’t even finish most of them. To be honest, finishing a game ONCE is rarer than I can believe.. much less playing through a game, as I did, so many times that you could just about do it blind-folded. There’s a video game backlog, at my house, of about 60 games (give or take, as some are M-rated and just for me). If you added up all the games I ever OWNED before I had children, you’d probably be lucky to get to 15. Now, though, my son and daughter are playing HeartGold and SoulSilver on their DSs… LOTR (son) and Lego Indiana Jones (daughter) on the 360 and Folklore on the PS3 and they’re anxiously awaiting Super Mario Galaxy 2 for the Wii. I mean… I had a Gameboy when I was a kid, but holy hell…
I don’t begrudge them the experience. It’s what they’ve known and I don’t imagine it will change very much in the future. But in an age of SMS text messaging and Email and so many other types of constant and immediate gratification, I wonder what type of gamers my kids will be. Second-generation CAGs, to be sure, but what will be the outcome of a childhood where multi-console backlog is the norm?
we’ve had a lot of visitors who have trouble getting *out* of our house, due to the child-safety cover on the doorknob on our front door. i’m thinking about installing something that’s a little bit more intuitive…
the problem with the way the feed was showing up in google reader should be fixed. again. probably.
i’ve added back the sidebar section that shows the name of each author and their respective post count. this was mostly to point out that, even though i haven’t posted in over a year or so, i really did do it at one time…
the names are also links to a list of posts just by that author… which isn’t of much use, but whatcha gonna do?
oh, and here’s a link to the very first post of the most recent incarnation of bitzer.org: http://www.bitzer.org/?p=4
the url is a bit annoying (post 4 instead of 1), b/c of the way wordpress imported all the old moveabletype blogs posts and the way i competely didn’t feel like correcting it afterwards.
this is also the reason why i appear as both “bitzer” and “Bo Boulware.” add the numbers together… i’m winning!
see you next year!
Rasengan!
It’s the first thing that came to my mind when I came to the post. I blame Carl.
Aidan fussed for several minutes until we figured out he was trying to get the sunglasses on his head the way he sees me wear mine. Then he proceeded to run around the dining room table until they fell off. Rinse. Repeat.
I just paid my yearly domain fees, which reminded me that I owned the rights to this fancy website thing. I guess it hasn’t been collecting dust, but I haven’t put anything into it and I guess that’s a bit of a shame, considering how excited I originally became when the domain became available. I’m a little bit amused that I used the phrase “I guess” twice in one sentence.
In the past few months, though, only a few significant things have happened. Ninety percent of them have already been covered by my wife, so no need to mention “the house” or “the offspring.” The thing that’s of the most signifcance, that hasn’t been mentioned (and, arguably, the most significant of those that have), is that Matt and Sue have had their boy. Other than the obvious significance of their attempts to raise the global IQ average, the baby’s not a girl. This defies several known, natural laws and calls into question the gender of Matt’s “nephew.”
Whatever. It’s also 2009.
Oh, and we elected a U.S. President with an African father. I prefer to think of him as half-atheist, though. Except I think his biological father was an atheist also. I guess that makes him 2/3 atheist, practically, and 100% biologically? Or something? I dunno.
Um… that’s about it, I guess. I’ve also showered several times.
Having issues posting from a browser. Just testing email posting.
We’re all happy to have our stuff, but I’d have to say that Aidan is, currently, the happiest person on my street. I don’t know if he even remembers having it in Kuwait.
The lion’s share of our household goods arrived this morning. No more sitting on camp chairs in the living room. No more kids sleeping on inflatable mattresses. No more room to walk around… My house is about to look like a furniture showroom.
So, evidently, if you’re attaching an image to a post, you need to include at least a single line break or it wrecks your proverbial shit.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
We went to the farmer’s market on Saturday. It was kinda lame. Evidently it’s mostly a crafts market. The only thing I hate more than large groups of people is large groups of people and *crafts.*
So I setup a couple of plugins in Wordpress. One makes it easier to read from mobile devices (if it detects a supportes molbile web browser) and the other let’s me post from my blackberry. Wordpress already supports email posting but this plugin supports photo attachments and categories. Of course, all my categories are borked, but that’s another issue. The only problem is that it seems to truncate any text that’s in the email if there’s an image. I’m not sure if it’s based on line breaks or what. Not too concerned right now.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
This is a test.
Jub jub.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
i was going to make a comment about how long it’d been since i last posted. but aside from the fact that it sounds like the beginning of all those Catholic confessions on television, i’m too lazy to actually look to see how long it’s been. whenever there are extended periods of time when i don’t post, i always feel obligated to provide some sort “synopsis” like i’m atoning for my lack of posting. this invariably leads to my not posting. i’ve probably already made this exact post in the past, actually. let’s see… search to find it and just link to it or just retype the whole thing. i’m not sure which would take long, but now i’m wasting time thinking about it.
my wife’s obviously gotten the hang of this whole bloggin’ thing. luckily, she doesn’t get a lot of comments from her girly, mommy-club friends, leaving me to feel like i can post using profanity and pictures of nekkid girls.
or something. whatever.
For anyone out there who looked at our stuff and thought “those crazy &%$*#@! want how much for that crap!?!,” we’re now slightly less crazy. By about 50%. Oddly enough the main thing left is the one thing I wanted to take back with us the most (other than my TV); the dining room set. If it doesn’t sell I might take one of the end chairs (with the arms) with me to NM. It won’t match the other chairs at whatever table we get there, but who cares (other than Beck).
