An Open Letter

The first and last game I ever played was pokémon Platinum. It was somewhere around the fourth grade, and I had a small Nintendo DS lite. The day I got it, for the first time in my life I stayed up. I hid my DS under my pillow, and would quickly close it and put my head down and act asleep if my parents walked by my room. That first night I got all the way to Erika, with my trusty turtwig: Turdy. A few months later my best friend would tell me turd was the word for shit, and I damn near lost my mind denying that was true.

When I finally reached the end dimension to capture giratina, I remember being lost. For nearly a week I could not find my way out, and the end dimension frankly scared me. The most hope I had was being able to talk with my friend at school with only my memory to guide my questions. When I finally saw giratina, I used my master ball on him after getting him low enough and not capturing him with 20 ultra balls. When the ball finally closed shut I kept shaking from joy.

That small Nintendo DS cartridge contained a world. Since then every game, no matter how powerful of a system I run it on, has fit within a 3x7 screen on my phone. Every piece of wonder and magic has been distilled into a prepackaged video or walk through on my computer screen. In that Nintendo DS, those struggles were as real as these new ones are fake.

Since then I have not played a game. When I played Minecraft for thousands of hours, that was wonder went instead to some name on YouTube, showing me how to make a nether portal. When I killed the dragon, that was someone else figuring out what the crystals were. There was no magic, no wonder, and no triumph at the end.

As an adult I don't think I'm alone trying to chase a familiar nostalgia of the magic that games captured when I was a child. In an age of information where any questions can be trivialized in a matter of seconds, I have forgotten how to struggle. But I truly believe there's nothing great in this world if it is not worth struggling for.

Don't read any reviews, Don't look at any other content. Don't even read the description on the game. Just buy the game, get a controller with vibration if you can, and play the game fully blind throughout. You can only experience things for the first time once, do not squander this beautiful chance.