Escapist Editorials

Letters to the Editor: Of Love and Games

In response to "Parents Just Don't Understand" from The Escapist Forum: Wait a minute there. I'm 46. I've played videogames since 1980. Yours isn't the videogame generation - OURS was. And it's not a generational gap - some folks (most folks) just don't like videogames - that's the same with twenty year-olds as it is with 40 year-olds or 80 year-olds. Everyone my age made a conscious decision to like or dislike videogames - it wasn't something we simply didn't have access to - pong was in arcades in the 1970s, console gaming and personal computers that played games were available in 1980. I had a ZX Spectrum PC and an Intellivision when I was a teenager - and MY dad (who was born in 1931) played games on both. So let's just stop this 'parents can't grasp gaming' nonsense. Maybe yours can't, but mine could and my daughter has a dad who plays videogames much more than she does.

- Beery

My mother and I both raise one eyebrow when looking at the other's favorite pastime. She's a civil war re-enactor who makes and sells period clothing. I'm a pretty avid gamer (tabletop, video, you name it you got it). Both of us have dipped into the other's hobby on occasion and found it not for us: I spent a summer wearing a corset and hoops to please her, she tried valiantly to beat Donkey Kong Country when I was a kid. I was miserable the entire time I was laced up, she never got past the second level.

Whenver the two of us get into a discussion it becomes clear that we each think the other's hobby is a waste of time and a huge "gold sink", that the other's interest is boring and of no lasting value. Both of our interests are at core experiential... you're left with precisely the same thing when you're done with a video game as you are at the end of a successful bicentennial parade: satisfaction.

Sometimes I'm not sure why we can't admit how alike we are.

- Solipsis