Sharing and Imagination…Where did they go?
Has anyone else noticed how people don’t share anymore? It seems that people have simply forgotten how to get along. Does this sound familiar when it comes to video games?
Kid 1 “C’mon! I want to play too!”
Kid 2 “You can when I die”
Kid 1 “But you’ve been playing forever! I want a turn!”
Kid 2 “I’ll let you play when I die”
Kid 1 “You just beat that level, can I try now?”
Kid 2 “I SAID YOU CAN WHEN I DIE!”
Mom/Dad “GET OUTSIDE AND PLAY!!”
I’m not one to point fingers, BUT, this time I would like to point to finger and blame the infamous Super Mario. That’s right. Mario. Remember the days of playing Super Mario on the original Nintendo Entertainment System? If you played two player you always wanted to be Mario. It’s not that Luigi wasn’t good, it just that if the person playing as Mario was good at the game you didn’t get a chance to play…ever.
For those who don’t know, Super Mario Bros 2 player worked as follows:
1) Mario goes first.
2) Luigi goes second.
3) Your turn was over when you died.
Simple right? Wrong! The person playing as Mario is able to beat the game before Luigi even gets a chance to play. Now, this usually wasn’t the case, but what did happen a lot is that Mario would get in the groove and Luigi would just be on the bench watching the game go by. When Luigi finally got a chance to play he was cold and tended to die quicker than Mario giving the game back to Mario. Do you see how this isn’t fair? The world would be different if they added a player change at the end of each level and well as each death. That would have been fairer. Mario taught us that being Player 1 was better than being Player 2. It also made a generation of selfish Player 1s who don’t want to pass the controller over for any reason “You can have it when I die” I’m not saying that the Super Mario Franchise is evil, I’m just saying that this could be a reason for America’s youth/ young adults behavior.
My parents always told me and my friends to put the game (NES, Genesis, N64, Xbox) away and go play outside. So that’s what we did. We still loved our video games, don’t get me wrong, we played them all the time. Even when we were outside playing, we would pretend we were in the game. That’s called imagination, something you don’t see every day now when kids discover video games.
What are your thoughts on this? I hope it made sense.
Thanks for reading!
Shoeless Joe Kenyon
Barefoot Buffalo 