The PlayStation is Dead Date Thursday, April 18, 2024 - 10:01 AM PST Topic Theories Recently my Playstation one began to fail. As of the writing of this articl, it is completely defunct. The laser-reader is dead, and the motor for the spinner is dying rapidly. It seems more poignant and respectful to let it die than try and preserve it. The PlayStation became a generational change, in my limited perspective. You don't see geeks anymore; they have new words for technophiles that sound more respectful and help to better characterize the citizens of the digital age. I watched the PlayStation come on the scene and suddenly everyone wanted a video game system. As a catalyst, the PlayStation succeeded in far more facets than just integration of the geek community. For a while there was a clear line between the Atari/SNES players and the rest of the world. VGA/EGA video cards and King's Quest and Super Mario was a language and mythology of a pragmatic and divided community. The internet was bringing people together, but the plateau of gamers still made the super-geek-stereotype a clearly outlined figure on the horizon. We had a PlayStation hooked up to a projector in the video store in the small mountain town where I grew up; when the owners were out we'd turn off the lights in the store, sit in front of the projector and play Resident Evil in all its bloody, heart-stopping glory. And it wasn't just geeks who played it, not with how that game was. The kids who liked horror movies showed up, the violent militia-types liked the idea of a zombie being cut in half with a 12-gauge shotgun. the game played like a good thriller movie. We'd sit there, kids from eight to twenty, and eat popcorn and yell at the person holding the controller. Sports games came into being then; platform racers became interactive, and with better control than computer keyboards and mice afforded. Something about a handheld controller, the gestalt of the interaction with the machine itself. And it was different and good. I see MTV hocking PS2 now, and remember when the stoners and punks and yuppies, all of us, sat and played rounds of Tenchu. The path for the invasion of Asian culture, on the level we see today, is probably the fault of video games. Tenchu was a gory game where you played the ninja of japanese myth, hiding in shadows and guting unsuspecting enemies. This was open floodgate for the coming tides of Asian culture that are becoming more commonplace by the day. We didn't subscribe as extensively to it as the kids now; sure, we had the Manga movies, but the comic books and children's action shows weren't around for us. If I turn on the TV now it's a culture of games and dreamlike animation. In the college dorms, we connect over the phone lines three X-Boxes and played "Halo" in massive games: the chinese marine, the disenfranchised athletes, the psychology majors and international studies liberals. It became so much more widespread than when I was a kid. My PlayStation is failing. It's eight years old. I look at the stack of games I have for it, and remember lethargy and wasting time. They were the sunny days of my summers and winters, the claim of my atrophy their domain enveloped. At least I can still beat most of the kids at the games. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=723