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?
