I don´t necessarily remember how I got my first
PlayStation. It was one of those items that simply appeared. I don´t remember
picking it up. I don´t remember the ride home from the local store where my
father bought it. Quite frankly the only moment I remember from such adventure
was a big shelf displaying tons of different packages, each one containing a
different game, a mysterious universe to unveil. I feverishly wanted my mother to buy me Tekken 3, since a good couple of my friends
already had the previous Tekken
installments, and that was the game every boy mostly desired at the time. Yet, the
salesman agreed with her, my mother, that such game was too violent for a seven
years old, so they picked up Crash
Bandicoot 3 and Hercules instead,
to what might have possibly been one of the greatest decisions ever made.
However, a little boy's memories happens to be of the strongest kind, since at
that point our existence is short, and our memory is sharper than ever. My
entire relationship with the magic grey box is as vivid as my today's late
breakfast. I easily remember I lived in fear of turning it on because, for some
reason, the connection with the television was malfunctioning, and I thought I
broke the console my parents put so much money on. So I would not even touch it,
thinking I was successfully fooling them. I easily remember how my mother, once
in a while, would give it a try, and if she could pull everything together, she
would tell me, when picking me up at school, that I had a surprise waiting for
me at home. I remember how fast my heart would beat while coming home, as if
the console could speak out loud that I broke it, something I never actually did.
I feel however, despite my peculiar
relationship with it, that the same thirty-two-bit
grey box became somewhat of a cult object to a certain generation. It is
one of those items almost all of us could easily draw with our eyes close. It
changed our views. It opened us up to a enormous number of life lessons that,
alongside with morals gave by the ones who raised us, made us distinguish
between right and wrong situations in life. Certainly, like any other
interaction system, it must be managed, for not everything is good. If my
mother would have bought me Tekken 3
instead of Crash Bandicoot 3, perhaps my
perception on violence would be corrupted, and I would've become a troubled boy.
Yet, my point is, despite somewhat of a popular belief that gaming consoles
might be a bad influence on a young
child's mind, I would like to pitch in favor of it: sure, they might become
somewhat of addictive, and unconsciously lead to bad actions, distorted
thoughts of how everything around us function. Yet, the little boy or girl
playing that console, a developed model of the same one I once played, cannot
be responsible for the lessons presented to him or her. It is up to their
parents, to the ones that teach them, to contemplate the difference between
good and bad, and to be the judges of what a child may or may not play. After
all, I only desired Tekken 3 while at
the store. After all, I have never felt happier than when I got home from
school, only to find out that my mother had been able to turn on the console.
No comments:
Post a Comment