Recently my procrastination flared up. I did not want to do what I had to do or should do, so I did something else I also did not want to do but could still manage: I began organizing the games I had played. Organizing mostly meant listing names. When the list reached nearly a hundred, I felt a strange pang. It also made me realize that my personal gaming era had ended.
Born in the 1980s, forming memories in the 1990s, I lived through the rise of game rooms, arcades, computer rooms, internet cafes, and esports. I did not actually play in the first three. At most I followed friends inside and watched. Primary school in the 1990s strictly banned the so-called three rooms and one hall—arcades, billiard rooms, video halls, dance halls—so even getting through the door felt like a personal breakthrough. I was afraid of doing wrong. As for playing, I had no pocket money, and I was bad enough that playing would have been embarrassing.
Then our family got a Subor learning machine. My main energy went into washing dishes during holidays to earn money for cartridges. Looking back, I probably bought pirated ones anyway; they came in dozens or hundreds of games on one cartridge. The Saturn and Sega machines were already around, but I was happy enough with FC games. Most of my cartridges were left by older cousins after they moved on to higher school. The only-child generation had no siblings, but our parents had siblings, so cousins visited during holidays. My older cousins introduced me to games and comics when I was small. Because I was young, and because my only younger cousin did poorly in school, the older cousins' toys eventually ended up with me. Now those cartridges, along with the ones I bought, sit in a big box in storage.
Swapping cartridges with kids my age was the most common weekend activity among boys. On weekends, friends would bring their treasures to one house. Sometimes we played board games, sometimes custom-rules poker, sometimes read comics, but mostly we played games. If someone's home was not convenient, we caught grass carp and shrimp in the neighborhood pond, stole bricks from construction sites to build a stove and play with fire, played football on the lawn, shot marbles, played cards, or caught grasshoppers. Fads came in waves—card collecting, mini 4WD cars, new toys, snacks—usually spreading through the school shop and the stalls at the gate. That era without phones or internet actually offered a lot of choices. Now it feels as if everyone plays alone.
PCs began entering homes after 2000. A few well-off friends got them first, and then the names of PC games started circulating. Slow as I was, I gradually noticed that cartridges could no longer be traded, because other people had moved on to CDs and floppy disks. After enough pestering, my family bought a computer, and high school began. It was awkward: I had the equipment, but with only one day off every two or three weeks, there was hardly time to play. Games were genuinely cheap then—pirated discs cost two to five yuan on the first floor of the computer market. I remember buying discs that would not even read. Even under those conditions, I finished several games, including Chinese Paladin. Meanwhile my friends had already graduated from cheating in Legend of Mir and Stone Age and thrown themselves into World of Warcraft. I realized I was about five to ten years behind my peers in games. Still, school came first then. By that point I could roughly classify games—role-playing, real-time strategy, shooter and action, casual, simulation and management. Classification is the first step in research.
In 2006 I entered university. The more advanced members of my cohort were already hopping between online games. That was also when I really encountered the internet. A major reason was that internet cafes had sprouted everywhere and became the default place for university students to watch movies and play games. By 2008, laptops had finally fallen to an affordable four or five thousand yuan. For a while, entertainment in the male dormitory became networked Counter-Strike or Warcraft III. Everyone hugged a laptop and explored happily. I did too, but I had already developed the idea of controlling my time, so I usually played on weekends, and still single-player RPGs. My peers had their online time first occupied by social networks, then quickly turned into the farmland games on those networks, and gradually the browser-game world took over. One thing worth remembering: during the winter break of my first year, I bought my first legitimate game, Chinese Paladin Inn. In the end, the disc was accidentally damaged.
Because I was slow to react, I finished university without falling into the MMO pit. But around that time I was messing with virtual machines and came across many single-player games from a decade earlier, so while playing new games I was also catching up on old ones. My belatedness had an advantage and a disadvantage. Since I cared about both new and old games, I could feel technical progress. The bad part was that whenever I got stuck, I immediately wanted a walkthrough. Text-adventure games were something I only encountered in university. Apart from the branching choices, they looked a bit like slideshows, but exploring that genre made me realize how tightly anime, comics, and games were connected. The milestone here was the Ace Attorney series. I played it on an emulator, of course, but it became a starting point for understanding ACG fandom and otaku culture. A university classmate led me in. Only then did I discover that Japan had a large body of excellent work beyond Joe Hisaishi and Hayao Miyazaki. From university onward, I picked up the anime and comics hobby I had dropped in middle school.
My tastes were utilitarian, frankly. I did not have time to re-experience everything, so I played the canonical games, the so-called masterpieces. The more I played, the more I found that my taste did not match reviews. Many games other people loved, I simply could not finish. Around me, Symbian had appeared, mobile games were germinating, and handheld consoles were booming. Unlike the GBA I had followed, this was the age of the DS Lite and the PSP, and I naturally missed it. A first-year master's stipend of 900 yuan a month could not buy one, and it was in graduate school that I became financially independent from my family. I am ashamed to say that although I had scholarships and an on-campus work-study job in college, together they covered only part of my living expenses, and I resisted working outside. Tuition and living costs were mostly paid by my family. Looking back, tuition at Chinese universities was almost free compared with North America, though I hear it is rising. On the cost-effectiveness of mass higher education, China still scores high. No wonder students from Asia, Africa, and Latin America keep coming to study in China; besides the super-national treatment, they pay very little. But elite higher education needs ample funding. Private schools abroad use endowment management to guarantee income that offsets tuition for low-income students. China has many public universities, and they mostly rely on debt.
The game I remember most from graduate school is Uncharted Waters IV. Four people in my dorm were playing it at the same time. We could not play online, but we were happy. Then came the wave of smartphones and tablets. PC gaming time was increasingly squeezed out by mobile games and touch-screen tablet games. Trends in that period were phenomenon-level waves, driven mainly by WeChat Moments. The new genre I personally encountered then was puzzle games, which had previously been mixed in with RPGs; the representative was the Professor Layton series. I won a tablet in the annual meeting lottery—and then the annual meeting was canceled because of the eight-point regulations—so many games I played were on that tablet through emulators. Around this time my six-year-old laptop retired and a MacBook Pro took its place. On the computer side, my gaming career was basically over. Actually, it had ended earlier: from 2011 I dual-booted Ubuntu and Windows 7, and mostly used Ubuntu. I kept Windows 7 for games, but the games had long been downloaded and installed. I simply had no time to play them.
By then my peers had gradually become the pillars of their households, and they played less and less. At first we still discussed Sanguosha; later we stopped discussing games altogether. I suspect everyone has a gaming window of about a dozen years. Before it, you are too young to understand; after it, you want to play but have no time. It is an hourglass. When the sand runs out, it is gone—not passively disappearing, but quietly and voluntarily abandoned. After my income rose, I willingly bought some games even though I knew I would never play them. It was a way to repay some debt in my mind. This is what my generation went through. At my age, I still have friends who buy and play games with relish, but I truly realize that I can no longer play. I no longer have the energy to understand a whole worldview, or to explore once, follow a walkthrough once, and do a random run once. The games are still the same games, and they still attract me, but unless I hit a short-term state like the one at the beginning of this year, I really cannot spend a whole night on a game as I once did. Now at most I watch someone else finish a game at double speed on a video site, just as I entered arcades in primary school. The mindset is very different. Think of the boom in idle games—can that even count as a game? Mending the fold after the sheep are gone.
The games I played are probably about average for my peers, but I doubt the median can exceed fifty. Some peers may not have had my opportunities; others may have played more than a hundred games by primary school. The old phrase playing games ruins ambition is not wrong. Gaming now looks like a luxury. Time and era matter equally. Some people have time to play games, but the era they grew up in had no suitable games. By the time masterpieces appear, they have no time. Freud had a theory of projection: when people expect that they cannot complete something, they project it onto others. This may be the source of the so-called idol burden. In today's livestream boom, this projecting mentality spreads more easily: You, my friend, have extraordinary talent—come finish this game and let us see. Behind this helplessness is both anxiety and a related realization of a dream. It used to appear in parents' expectations of their children; now through the internet it is passed to idols. This may be the inner mindset of keyboard warriors in public comments. It is not that they do not know the demands are too high; it is precisely because the demands are high that they hope the idol will not make a single mistake. Why bother? It is better to take it easy. What is past is past; what was missed was missed. The imperfection of your own life cannot be changed by observing someone else's perfect life—though it can feed a lot of people. If you want something, go get it yourself. As long as you do not follow the crowd, you will eventually figure out what you want.
After writing this, my gaming window may still be open. I may play some FC or GBA games to relax my brain, but I will not stop there. It is not that the scenery is bad; there is other scenery ahead. Those past regrets will not become a burden. They will only become a memory of an era, a fragment that belongs only to me.
Some titles that still surface from that window:
- Tale of Wuxia
- Chinese Paladin series
- Xuan-Yuan Sword side stories
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky series
- Romance of the Three Kingdoms IX
- Taikou Risshiden V
- Uncharted Waters IV
- Harvest Moon
- Ace Attorney series
- Professor Layton series
- Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
- Richman 4
- Metal Slug
- Warcraft
- Counter-Strike
- Red Alert
- Hero Legend (the Wenquxing e-dictionary version)