Feel the Magic

October 10th, 2008

harvest moon snes

The other day I was reminiscing with my brother about our childhood as wide-eyed, avid game fans. Back then gaming seemed to possess this wonderfully infectious energy about it that saw you and all your friends enchanted by its very greatness.

My brother then asked me if games were still this magical today, and I think it is. The only difference between now and then is that now I’m older, and have a greater understanding of everything that is going in within the industry, hence the excitement of the unknown has somewhat faded. Where as being a child, in a time before internet, you could only know as much as your surroundings would let you.

I don’t think that the magic has wanned and I don’t plan on going to go all starry-eyed and talk about the “good old days”. No doubt there are certain generations or time periods in the history of games which I prefer over others, but overall we’ve run a pretty steady trek. It’d be hard to waiver one time being significantly more better than another.

Despite the evenness of our history, I can’t deny it, there is a magic to familiarizing yourself with something new. When you slowly begin to make sense of the experience for the first time there is this uplifting feelings that fills up inside you. No doubt many of us who have played games for a long time, experienced this feeling as kids. I guess you could say that we had this feeling during our gaming prime. So hold that thought for a moment and let’s think about these guys:

ideal family
All those Mums, Dads, Aunties, Uncles and the elderly that are now traversing their gaming prime, going through that same experience like us for the first time thanks to developers like Nintendo and PopCap Games.

We might all be too brute to acknowledge it but we were all beginners at one stage or another. We all started off playing fairly privative, simplified games and yes we didn’t like the feeling of others who were better at it than us but we endeavored and here we are. These new people coming into the market are no different from us 10, 15, 20 years ago when our fascination piqued. They too are now settling into their gaming prime and I think that’s fantastic. So let’s try and encourage this rather phenomena than dismiss it.