E-tards

When i was 6 or 7 years old, i woke up one christmas morning, excited as to what Santa had brought me. and behold, as my brothers and i tore open the final present, addressed to all three of us, my life, as i knew it at the time would be changed forever. There in front of me was a Nintendo Entertainment System...or NES as it was so beautifully dubbed. Sitting there in all its glory was a small grey and black box, a mess of cables, and two rectangle controllers with corners capable of gouging out someone's eye if the other player just so happened to use it as a shuriken. And next to it, packaged in styrofoam was a small dark grey cartridge, with Super Mario Bros, and Duck hunt...i was so excited...and i will now admit to the world, that although i was retardedly excited, I had NO FUCKING CLUE what it actually was. Up until that point, i don't think i even knew what Nintendo was, nor did i care. I was content with Atari, and i really didn't even know a new "entertainment system" had been developed. Why did i care? I spent most of my time playing with GI Joe figures or drawing vastly intricate fantasies of super heroes and knights at arthur's round table....so this whole Video Game thing was a new experience for me.

Now, needless to say, being a high strung 7 year old (i'm still high strung, but now i'm 26) i can make the obvious statement that i was immediately hooked. There i was, christmas afternoon, kneeling in front of the TV, trying to shoot the hell out of those little ducks, and getting pissed whenever that fucking dog laughed at me...but i was hooked. It wasn't long until i was rushing home after school to play mario bros...which steadily turned into any number of games we ended up purchasing...captain skyhawk, mario 2, rolling thunder, etc, etc... i became addicted...and much like other children, NES became SNES, which became SEGA, which eventually, for a brief period turned into SEGA SATURN, which inevitably turned into Nintendo 64...but that, my friends, is where the train pretty much ended.

See, as the other early teens such as myself were frantically spending their, or their parents' hard earned dollars on whatever new system happened to be in fashion that week, I just...lost interest. As Playstation became popular, my interest purely faded...PS turned into PS2 which eventually turned into PS3...i saw sega put out the dreamcast, and then fall off the face of the planet...Nintendo put out the Gamecube, which my little brother purchased, and we still have to this day...Then came XBOX...then XBOX 360, and countless other mods or whatever gaming nerds call them...progressively the systems got more realistic, more fancy, more futuristic...and ultimately more fucking expensive...eventually plateauing at the nintendo Wii.. All around me my friends became completely addicted. Now, that's not to say i didn't dabble. I took a couple hits of Playstation here and there...i did a line or 2 of XBOX....i had a brief love affair with a little bit of Wii bowling running through my veins..but i was never addicted. It was a social thing...it was a a once in a while thing...

Now, being the age i am at, i can safely say that there is really no urge in me to ever play video games. I don't know, call it...ADULT. call it growing up...call it maturity. Sure, i still take the occasional pleasure in playing NHL Hitz 2003, or creating my own riciculous wrestlers on WWF Day of Reckoning...but that's pretty much the jist of it. My interest fades fast and i quite honestly don't give a shit about it. But that doesn't stop me from noticing other people my age just completely absorbed in these ultimate wastes of time. Take guitar hero and Rock band for example. Genius? yes...innovative for sure, and entertaining as hell....for the first couple times you play. after that, it becomes a monotonous display of stupidity. What does one really accomplish by beating tom morello or slash in a guitar battle? What do you really acheive if you can play that rush song on expert on drums? Nothing. You literally walk away with nothing but a ridiculous sense of "pride" that you just "beat" a computer. When in reality, you just wasted about 49 hours pressing buttons in front of a tv screen when you could have been doing literally ANYTHING else.

everywhere i look, i get constantly sickened by seeing grown mens' eyes light up at a commercial for a new videogame...OMG NHL 10 is coming out!!? i HAVE TO GET IT!! but do you? I mean, ok, go spend $70 on a game to play on your $300 system which will literally give you ZERO amount of tangible return. Yet you run out and buy it anyway...why? who fucking knows...to satisfy some craving inside of you for some form of goals or acheivements you could never accomplish in real life...goals you probably COULD have acheived if you had gotten your ass off the fucking couch and actually DONE something with your life. But no, you just had to find the princess, or win the cup, or whatever...and when it's all done...when you beat the game...when you have finished your victory dance...you're still there in your bedroom, or your basement or your man cave with no girlfriend, and hundreds of dollars worth of games you don't want to play anymore, because they have no "replay value"...

All around you, while the world is working, spinning, passing you by, you live in your head, inside a screen where you can be anything you want, but you're really nothing at all. You wear your little headsets and talk to your team mates, but in reality, you can't even fire a gun, let alone be a part of an elite military force. Yet you all just sit there on your couches taking pride and glory in...GAMES. they're games. they are glorified versions of army men, or scrabble or fucking Shoots and ladders. And you think people should bow down to you because you can play Dragonforce on expert. Wow. Braa-fucking-vo. Congrats. you spent hours of your life you will never get back just so you could train your hands to press buttons really fast in a proper sequence. Oh you hold the heavyweight title on Fight night round 3? Awesome! congrats! now let's see if you can take a real hit...OOh, you have the high score on halo? How many gunshots do you think you can take in real life before your health bar runs out? yeah. live in reality please.

Now am i totally against video games? Hell no! I totally enjoy them from time to time. If i am bored, or home sick, or recovering from a hangover, i love putting in a game and just having a little bit of mindless fun. Prince of persia games are sick and i love every one of them...there is nothing wrong with a little bit of fun. But it's when it becomes a fucking addiction or a habit that you need to get help. When you tell me you have no time in a day, or that you're too busy to do something, only to find out you're too busy because you factored your 7 hours of World of Warcraft into your schedule, THEN there's a problem. When you say you had no time to get something done last night, and really you were just playing metal gear solid for 4 hours, THAT'S a problem.

So i guess the only thing i can really say, it just grow up. Seriously. now i know you hardcore gamers are going to say "well they're using videogames to train military now, and train pilots, and blah blah blahhhh"...well, that may very well be true....but let me just ask how many of you fat lazy sons of bitches plan on joining the military any time soon....

*crickets*

Yeah, that's what i thought.
game over.