My son is around retro consoles quite a bit. He recently found my Gameboy Color with Pokémon Blue in it. He really wanted to play the game (was ecstatic, in fact), but complained right off the bat that he couldn't see anything and put it down after 1 minute. Absolutely no persistence. When you had one game, one console and all the time in the world, you explored. Now you have an infinity of games and you don't play anything anymore.
This is very insightful. I do find myself overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer amount of stuff there is available to me. Between the retro games I own, the new game systems, TV with 200 channels, phones with unlimited apps, internet with unlimited information, etc.
I wonder if I were to be a kid in the 2010s, rather than the 1980s, if I would have the same appreciation for things that I do now. I feel like an old bastard, but "back in my day we had a few new games a year, and we were happy with them."
Makes me nostalgic for the days of shared experiences. When there were three TV channels, everyone watched the same shows. There was a time when baseball was America's game. A few new movies came out a month and that was all there was to watch. Part of why the fabric of this nation is becoming unwound is that there isn't really a shared identity anymore. You have 300 million people doing their own things and no one knows or cares about what anyone else is doing. There's a really good book Bowling Alone that I recommend people read, basically talks about the falling apart of a communal society.
Sorry for the rant and off topic, that post had a mind of its own.
