The Old Gamer
As a youngin’, I often get tired of hearing older people whine about the “good old days,” when even your enemies went out of their way to be nice to you, when you could get seven pounds of chocolate for a penny, and when your kids could play outside by themselves, even in the middle of the road or in the county jailhouse, without any danger of being bothered. It’s probably some rite of passage that youth have to go through. Probably, when I’m older, I’ll bother my kids about the “good old days,” when gas was only $4.00 a gallon.
I do not yet wish to join the small subset of elderly folk who only think backwards. However, there is one area of life that seems to have changed for the worse: gaming. Well, not the games, per se. It is the gamers who are at fault. See, it used to be in the (*sigh*) good old days that a game would be full of mind-bending puzzles coupled with a great story-line. Almost every non-arcade game had puzzles in it, and they required intellect, skill, and the ability to see things from different angles. Most importantly, they required imagination. In those days, one couldn’t necessarily see the old chest and its multi-faceted lock… a green-and-black monitor just couldn’t dish out enough resolution. But, in the mind, one could see it clearly, and one could come up with a viable solution to unlock the chest. Yes, sometimes it took hours or days. But that was the fun of it! These days, most games seem to be quick and easy. Diablo, Battlefield 1942, World of WarCraft… the “puzzles” in these games take, at most, a few hours to accomplish. True, they have other time-wasting perks, but the element of hard-thought is gone.
Not in shame I admit that I miss the old days. Give me Mystery House, Quest for Glory, Space Quest… I’ll give you every graphics-pumping no-brainer game we have today.
edits-
-Changed “lame-story-lined” to “no-brainer” as pointed out by Ed.
