Growing up as a child my family had one TV, lived in a small apartment and didn’t have cable. My friends and I would play outside, sometimes safely and sometimes finding piles of scrap that our parents would yell at us if we were to be discovered in. Of course rightfully so, our safety was top priority. The one thing that we used was our imagination. Then when I was six my father purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System and my definition of playing was changed.
I began playing Nintendo and was immediately hooked. I was constantly wanting to beat my old scores and try new games, always asking my dad to let me rent new ones on Fridays. I found myself playing more inside with my Nintendo than I did going outside. I still played with friends and we had fun, but we didn’t use our imagination as much, the games created the fantasy world our minds used to create.
As newer systems came out, graphics got better and everybody wanted to the newer and better systems. Sega and Super Nintendo, then Nintendo 64 were better than the last, but it was the Sony Playstation that changed the world of gaming. This system used CD-ROMs as opposed to the game cartridges of previous systems and made the games more realistic because these discs were capable of having dialogue added into the programming. Once these hit the market our use of imagination was even more unnecessary than before. We had now in a matter of ten years gone from using our minds to play in worlds that we had created, to sitting in front of TVs allowing gaming systems create worlds for us.
I still from time to time turn on my old systems and play a little for nostalgia sake, but it pains me to see children who aren’t even out of elementary school who have their faces buried in the screen of a phone or tablet playing games. We live in a time where children are in constant need of stimuli to keep their attention. We as a society need to focus on more quality family time than giving our children electronic games and ignoring how they grow up not really knowing how to carry on a conversation.
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