4 - Wednesday. May 8, 1991 - North Shore News

Adolescent rites
of passage and the
Nintendo syndrome

PARENTS ARE shameless when it comes to promoting
their children, urging them to get on with life. I don’t
know why we don’t just give up and let nature take her

course.

ts it the fear that 35 years from
now you might look down in the
basement and there will be this
gigantic couch potato with a beer
belly and greying beard playing
some utterly incomprehensible
post-Nintendo sensorama game,
grunting when food is left at the
top of the stairs for it?

Scary thought. Possible, too.

I knew we were at a dangerous
pass, back before Christmas,
when the Kid’s Mom whispered to
me that we really ought to get him
a Nintendo. Every other kid in his
class had one.

His social development was be-
ing held back because he was
viewed as a Nintendo-illiterate
geek.

For ‘‘social development’’ read
girls.

He’s 12. Girls are illegal for
another four or six years. It drives
him insane that I’m not sure what
the ags of consent is. That’s how
old fam! All he knows is he’s got
a long, Jong, long time to wait.

In the four months since the
Nintendo arrived, the Kid has
gone through several changes. It’s
like watching a holographic re-run
of Dune in my own basement,
with my son mutating into a
half-god, half-sandworm before
my very eyes.

Fortunately, | was forewarned,
having read as much as I could on
the Nintendo Syndrome.

The victim becomes completely
addicted, experts acknowledge.
They eat, sleep and presumably
even go to the bathroom thinking
Nintendo.

The images on the screen are
captured by the brain and played
over and over again inside the vic-
tim’s head, a prison from which
he cannot escape.

His or her only hope is to win
through to the end of the game.

If they don’t they could easily
be trapped for life.

Once the kid has conquered the
first, second and third Mario
Brothers, he is out in the clear.

From there, his little mind can
evolve virtually any way it wants.
There is no doubt about it.
Nintendo is a device invented to
help the human species move on
to a new level of consciousness.

Bob
Hunter

STRICTLY PERSONAL

I tried it, by the way. After
dozens and dozens of hours, 1
made it as far as Level 7 of Mario
Number One.

I had been chomped by a nasty
little dragon, my body pitched
headfirst into a lava-like cauldron
so often, just within reach of
Level 8, that it had turned per-
sonal.

Me against the program.

Wrong. Bad Nintendo karma.
AILI do is set up a dissonance be-
tween me and the Mario Unit, if I
may call it that. That sucker
reacts.

It is impossible to play the game
without getting a sense that you
are in some sort of human-cyborg
relationship, with a par-
tially-evolved android type of
mind at the other end.

There have been books galore
written about golf. Hockey. Soc-
cer. Basebull.

Where is the great Nintendo
book? Whoever writes it has a
blockouster on his hands.

The Nintendo set was of course
basically intended as a way to
keep the Kid’s mind off the sub-
teen problem of his virginity. Who
knows? Maybe golf and all that
other stuff is a substitute for sex
too.

All we were looking for was a
kind of psychological saltpeter.
We had no idea the damn thing
would re-invent the lad,

m® 16th & Lonsdale, NORTH VANCOUVER 985-9161

Now he thinks... well, different-

ly.

The Gulf War, [ should add,
happened in the middie of the
Great Nintendo Mind Experiment.

There was the Kid, happily
nerdling out with the TV set down
in the basement when I came
home wanting to catch all the live
coverage from the Gulf.

The next thing you know, we
are taking the ultima.e ride ina
video camera mounted on the
snout of a smart bomb heading
down toward a chimney in
Baghdad, from the bomb’s point
of view.

In script language, you would
write: DESCENDING SHOT,
AERIAL, BOMB POV.

Wow!

For a moment, every sci-fi
movie ever made by Hollywood
had fused with actual military
aero-space technology and cut-
ting-edge television, beaming it
courtesy of satellites into the mid-
dle of the Kid’s Nintendo uni-
verse.

Not since Dr. Strangelove has
an audience had the kinky
pleasure of riding a bomb down
to its target.

Keep in mind that this was
happening during the final hours
of the Kid’s Formative Stage of
Life. What the long-term conse-
quences on the development of his
psyche will be, I have no way of
knowing.

It’s just that J get nervous when
he gets this cocky smirk on his
face, a strange glint flickers in his
eyes, and he announces: ‘I kicked
butt today.”

Savoring the memory, he adds:
“Felt good.’’

Help! We have created a
monster!

Wolo

Correction

The Classic Batteries adver-
tised in Woolco’s $1.44 Day
Sale in Sunday May 5, North
Shore News was incorrectly
priced. The pricing should
have stated $1.44 each.

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