boingboing.net — Guido N??ez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.
Nov 5, 2009 View in Crawl 4
gubatron2Nov 6, 2009
"Even if my parents could afford to buy a NES or a SNES when the times were good for us, we could not afford to buy games, so I played Mario a lot. I used to go to game parlors and play, made friends there, speaking not only about swords and crystals, combo breakers and special attacks, but also about AI, the future and technology, about that ... mysterious thing called the Internet (I met a girl who tried Compuserve!) and about nuclear war."I'm Loving this post, that was my life back when I was a kid/teen in Venezuela. Games were too expensive so you got really good at the ones you had. And when Mortal Kombat, Virtua Fighter, Killer Instinct were the hottest games we'd spend endless hours dropping "tokens" on those arcades. Making friends (and "enemies") from all kinds of places, with one thing in common, the challenge of the game and being the best you could be at it.Video games like Mortal Kombat were the first thing to teach me about disciplined training, striving for perfection, strategy, not letting your enemy breathe. Those skills then were used for sports like basketball, for chess, and ultimately for engineering, and business.