For the longest time it felt as though video games were growing up with me.
When I was a kid, video games felt like they were for kids. They were platform games with furry animal mascots. They were as vibrant and sugary as the cordial I guzzled whilst playing them. Even zeitgeist games like Street Fighter II, while technically violent, represented the benign violence of the playground. It was Jean Claude Van Damme. A spontaneous crowd around 8-year-olds that canât punch properly.
FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT
Then, when I was a teenager, video games were as clumsy as I was. The leap to 3D was as awkward as puberty. Video games had hair on their chest and nowhere to put all their bizarre, messed up sexual energies. The writing was like terrible teenage poetry. We stumbled over words, our voices breaking as we tripped over our slow-moving, train-wreck avatars.
âYou were almost a Jill Sandwichâ.
Video games were Resident Evil, Tomb Raider. We loved these video games then. They made sense in context. In 2017 itâs like cringing through a re-read of our crusty teenage diaries.
But personally, over the last five years or so, it feels like video games havenât evolved with me in the way Iâd hoped they would. Itâs less about âsophisticationâ, more the form video games take and whatâs expected of me if I want to engage. Over the last decade video games have become fragmented across an incredibly broad range of experiences and platforms, but the broad shift is clear: video games are Destiny. Video games are Overwatch, League of Legends or DOTA
Consoles are designed, it feels, to keep us hooked on âplatformsâ. To make it difficult for us to leave. Consoles are eco-systems, individual video games are eco-systems, with their own currencies, cultures and sub-cultures. Thatâs fine. I get it. I just canât be part of it. Not really.
I simply donât have the time.
Which is such a patronising, boring thing to say â but itâs true. I spend 90 minutes a day on public transport. Iâm married with a full-time job and a house thatâs constantly being destroyed by my two very young children. Free time is at a premium and itâs mostly spent doing banal shit. Folding laundry, loading and unloading the dishwasher. The idea of sitting down on my couch, turning on a console and dedicating time to Destiny dailies is insanely alien to me. Impossible to imagine almost.
And if that all sounds a bit âOld Man Yells At Cloudâ thatâs because well⊠I am an old man and I am yelling at a cloud. That cloud is my ability to engage with video games in a meaningful way. An ability that was sorta stolen from me over the past few years for a number of reasons. The main one: video games havenât catered to my lifestyle in a long, long time.
But that all changed with the Nintendo Switch.
This year I played more video games than Iâve played in a long time and I estimate around 80% of those hours were spent on the Nintendo Switch.
20% of those hours were spent on my couch, in front of my TV in the regular âgamingâ sense. 30% were spent lying in bed before falling asleep.
50% was probably spent on the bus, on the motorway in traffic, headphones blasting. In another world.
The Nintendo Switch is on some Bruce Lee shit. The âwater becomes the cupâ kinda stuff. If Iâm at home and somehow have the time the Switch connects to my TV quickly and efficiently. If someone needs the main TV thatâs fine, Iâll just slot the Switch into the controllers. On the bus, fine. In bed, fine. On holiday, fine. Waiting at the doctorâs because your kid has hand, foot and mouth, fine. All of it is fine.
The Nintendo Switch is designed for a busy life. Itâs designed specifically to filter seamlessly into the gaps of a busy life. I canât tell you how liberating that has been for me. How convenient it is.
Handheld games have existed before â even premium handheld experiences like the PlayStation Vita â but the Switch is different. Itâs not just that the console works as both a home console and a portable, itâs that the Switch is Nintendoâs primary, main console â that Nintendoâs best work will appear exclusively on it. Breath of the Wild isnât a spin-off, itâs the new Zelda. Odyssey isnât a weird Mario offshoot, itâs the successor to Mario Galaxy. That means something. Playing those premium, A+++ video games on the bus means something. I still â nine months later â refuse to take this for granted. It still makes me feel giddy.
For the first time in a long time it feels like video games are growing with me again. Not the games necessarily but the way Iâm engaging with them. The Switch feels like itâs for me in a way that other consoles arenât. The kids who sucked down sherbet whilst playing Super Mario World; who spent their moody teenage years hiding from their parents playing Metal Gear Solid.
Weâre boring adults now; with our kids and their shitty nappies and half a chewed up banana under the couch. With a pile of laundry we canât be fucked folding and a pile of video games we donât have time to play. Only the Switch gives us that time back. The Switch does an audit on the timeline of your garbage life and says â actually you can still sink 200 hours into an RPG. You can spend hours tracking down every stupid moon in Super Mario Odyssey.
And for someone who thought those days were long gone, thatâs powerful. Thatâs what makes the Nintendo Switch so special.
This story originally appeared on Kotaku Australia
