Sunday 20th NOV 05 10:00pm
TEENAGE
During the weekend i had the opportunity to go "back in time", so to speak, and think about my own childhood or the lack thereof. This came about on Saturday when out of the blue BoonYong called me up and asked if he could come to my place and chill with Jay and 2 other friends of his. I was feeling bored alone at home anyway and welcomed their company. They came by at about 9pm after having met me at the coffeeshop where i had my dinner. During dinner, they were talking about their trip to World Gaming Championships (WGC) at Suntec City. Last i heard, a Singaporean won Silver and USD$10,000 cash from the game. Wow. Should i change career and start playing games professionally now? LOL. But we all know that there is no future in being a professional gamer. Why? Reason is very simple really.
Time and Space.
To be a professional gamer in ANY genre of games, there needs to be a certain amount of time and effort invested in training. Upgrading your skills and learning from your mistakes. This all translates to time spent in training and money spent to buy the time you need for the training of that particular game. There is NO WAY a person can train at home alone unless it is a PS2 or XBOX kind of game. There is no monthly pay for a gamer to train. It all has to come out of his/her own pocket. The prize money at the end of the road is good no doubt. But that is provided you WIN the top few positions to get that kind of money. Even if you DO, then there will definately be loans to pay off, Bills, Etc Etc. How long can a person play games to earn a living anyway? No CPF? No sustainable monthly income? Well.... You do the math yourself. I will not go on about my views of being a professional gamer for it will get boring and my faithful readers will bitch my brains out. Suffice it to say, there is no logical and sustainable future as a professional gamer.
This leads me to my visit back in time. During my time in the 80's, as my more mature readers can attest to, there are no such distractions as computer games such as Counter-Strike, WarCraft or Diablo that attracts and hooks so many of the teenagers nowadays. There wasn't even handphones to talk about. During my day, you are considered a rich kid if you hold a pager. Ask a teenager what a pager is now and they would most likely look at you as if you just graduated from mount kinabalu. As a young boy, my only way of communication with my friends is through the phone at home. If i was waiting for a call, i would be stuck at home, afraid to go out least i miss that phone call of mine. Meeting people was also alot more troublesome. i had to get the exact location and time to meet my friends or i won't be able to communicate with them once i have left my house. Conversely, when i do meet up with my friends, they are very seldom late, as being late could cause you to miss your friends and you end up stuck at a place and not knowing what to do with yourself. Now, it's so easy to contact your friends through calls or SMSes via the handphone. And lateness is a very common happenstance. No one seems to value punctuality anymore. It's so simple to SMS at the last min and say you are stuck in your toilet bowl and the crap inside you refuses to exit from where the sun don't shine. At an instant, a handphone becomes an integral part of a person. You cannot live without it. Lose your handphone and you feel lost, out of connection with your surroundings. As a teenager, my idea of fun is playing block catching, catching grasshoppers and spiders and cycling around my neighbourhood just looking around. I never get bored because i already Knew that there is really nothing much for me to do anyway, and i am forced to make up my own fun. Call a few friends out for a game of catching, swimming, cycling. Good clean fun that does not even require money to do.
Now? Staying in one room with your friends alone is boring. Window shopping, Boring. Go swimming? Troublesome. Cycling? Too Tired. Go catch Spiders? You Must Be Insane. Their idea of fun? CS leh! DOTA leh! Go K-Box leh! Go Hair Saloon Leh!! Arcade LEH!!!!
Perhaps nowadays the only idea of fun for teenagers is the different ways of spending the currency they have in their wallets.
And i am not just saying this lightly. When BoonYong and gang was at my place on Saturday, We played poker cards. The first word they say? OK!! one card 10 cents!!. There are so many ways to have a fun game of poker. Does it have to involve money? We ended up using those small glass pebbles you use for the fishtank as our betting currency and the loser who loses ALL his pebbles will have to lose a piece of their clothing after every loss. BoonYong lost his clothings until his underwear. Then he went all quiet after that. No prize for guessing why. At the end of the day, i realised that i may be young at heart, refusing to grow up and leave my childhood side away, but the truth of the matter is, my time is really over, isn't it?
As a young man of 25 years old. Try as i might, how can i ever put myself in the shoes of the teenagers nowadays, who has totally different concepts of what is fun and what is not? I can click with my Juniors to a certain extent. But i find myself losing the connection slowly but surely. The profanity that kids as young as 12 are spouting around like it's their first language, the way they dress up and the holes they make in their body parts to put rings and studs, Their sense of fashion, even taking a bus ride horrifies them as they cannot understand why they could not just hail a cab from point A to B. Their awareness of sex at thier tender age.
Wow. Am i really getting old? or are kids now growing too fast?
EarlGrey
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