These days kids are born deprived of certain things and I feel sad for that reason. It is not money I’m talking about, not education or rights or any such materialistic or a philosophical thing even. I cant place a word to describe or “synonymize” such “things”. Let me start my trying to explain with certain examples.
When we were born, we were born into this textual world. I hadn’t seen a computer until I was 9 years old. When I saw one, I fell in absolute love with it. It had a huge fat screen with huge letters on them and a huge square cursor blipping away. Some of them were orange some were green depending on the fluorescent screen. The fat monitor rested on a chunky box with a huge 5 inch floppy drive with a lever attached to it. A keyboard that would go “chik-chik” “click-cluck” when pressed. It was a beautiful thing. I loved the “C:>” prompt. We used to type “logo” at it and a nice turtle would draw shapes for us. It was wonderful. Then we would be allowed to play a few games sometimes. Some of them were Ripper, Paratrooper, Gobman. We used to work hard at them to get the highest scores and put our names into the “Hall of Fame”.
As we grew up we saw the birth of the GUI! The replacement of the 5 inch floppy with the 3 1/4th inch floppy with a high density capacity of 1.44 MBs! WOW! Prince of Persia was a game in colour! I hadn’t played it until I was 14 when I got my Pentium 1 PC with 16 MBs of RAM and a SVGA monitor. Windows 95 was amazing and I played Doom 2, Wolfenstein, Blood. Then the true 3D games came and I played Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and everything. The coming of the CD-ROM was the best. The quality of the movies were so much better than seeing them on the VCR. The games got bigger, the softwares got bigger. The HDDs went from MBs to GBs and then to the higher GBs. It truly was a steady meditative path to Nirvana.
The DVD came and went, the LCD came and went, broadband came, P2P came, the torrent came, DIVX came. The battle of formats ensued. Sony fought for Blu-ray, Microsoft fought for HD. Blu-ray won. Cinemax brought us the 3D experience. Now stereoscopy is coming to the homes. HDMI 1.3 came. The games got bigger, and the huge forbidden gap between reality and side scrolling games got so thin that reality got less real than the games. The war between NVidia and ATI rages on. The war between PS3 and XBOX rages on.
My kids will be born in a HD ready, 3D ready, High Def LED world of surround sound and special effects and without sprites. My kids will be born in a world of games where there are no high scores to compete for, instead they have to avenge a friend or hunt mercenaries armed with the goriest of weaponry and the attitude of John McClain or Rambo. They don’t need to compete with friends for a high score, they compete against their friends on a LAN armed with a Kalashnikov. That is bad news. Blood splatter technology, Ragdoll technology, collision and particle system, pixel shader, vertex shader and all these things, I believe are an adult person’s bag of toys.
Give the kids some nice old 2D cartoons. And, what the fuck is Ben10 about?? Even pokemon and digimon sound better than that. Give them some nice side scrolling game with a highscore (and not on a phone!) with something to learn. Let them discover their own world, it’s a lot better appreciated that way. Let them not be deprived of the amazement of the wonders of technology.
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