Pakistan’s fast food video gaming culture.

Posted By administrator On December 24, 2009 @ 1:56 am In PC | No Comments

fastfood

Am I old? Disillusioned? Just a loser? D) All of the above?

I didn’t want to write this post because of being branded an arrogant purist. But then I said ‘Wait a sec! That’s a hardcore rep!’ So here we are.

Because I can’t for the life of me understand how fast we go through video games in this country. I was observing a spunky twelve year old visiting us for a couple of weeks. He went and bought 4 pirated video games. (Note: This site does not support piracy. Naughty naughty kid. Spanky spanky etc.) Now these were all ‘A’ list titles. Immense and easily with over fifty hours of game play each. Two days later he asked me to take him to a video game shop. “Why?” I asked. Wary of the assumption that I would supply the money and because I found the shocking orange, lime green and pink shirts the dude at the shop wore an affront to me in particular and to civilization in general.


“Because I finished all of the games I had!”

Huh?! A smiley has not been invented that would describe the expression my face had then.

It was somewhere between spluttering and incredulity. It turns out this is how he played video games:

1. Buy video game.

2. Go online to get the cheats and hacks. Esp God mode.

3. Go through the game like Aunties go through a buffet in Ramadan. Strong. Hard. Fast. No survivors.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Four games in two days. Four games that took thousands of hours to make cast aside in less then two days. I wanted to tell him how it took me two years to finish Mass effect - a few delicious hours every other weekend. How Dragon Age would give me solace through calorie laden nights till 2011. How games needed to be enjoyed like…. Well a good game! I wanted to grab him from the shoulders and shake him and tell him every game has a soul. It wants to be played, not consumed and disposed like a condom at a Cancun Spring Break party.

But in the end I did what every person confronted with injustice in this country does. I did nothing. I did not even lament the fact that we are fostering a culture of instant gratification, of quantity over quality, of a lack of appreciation of those intangibles that define the substance of worthy lives.

I went and googled “Megan Fox’ after turning Safe Search off. That always makes me feel better!

- Habib “Noori Nath” Khan