Games I used to play..

Technology has affected every bit of people’s lives.. and it goes even to simple things like the idea of fun. Games to be specific. Do people play games any more? Do we have the attention span in this fast-paced, instant gratification world of ours?

We played a lot of games when I was growing up – time-honored ones like hide and seek, marbles, shatong, can and slipper games, most of them are group games and are to be played outdoors. I can still evoke how each game tends to heighten my adrenaline. I got my first few bruises from playing those games. I broke my right elbow when I was playing “Hide and Seek,” with my desire to be the last to be caught up, I decided to do the unthinkable, climbed up to our neighbor’s old house and unfortunately the ceiling wasn’t able to support my weight and I ended up crashing towards the floor, upside down. On another incident, I also broke one of my rib bones while playing “shatong,” phew! so much of my injuries. What’s surprising though was i could like play the entire day and still have much spare energy to grab something to bite afterwards.

During long hours, at times when i got stuck in our house on a rainy afternoon, I remember sitting on the floor of our living room with my sisters, playing Monopoly. Our eldest was never one to deliberately lose a just game because my other sister and I were basically not as wise as she was back then. You had to be sharp to beat her, but what a sense of accomplishment when you did. Monopoly has got to be the longest game in the world - it goes on endlessly. But it was one favorite of ours throughout my childhood. There’s also “Scrabble.” One memorable game of scrabble we played with my parents once. The game was dead serious, and it so happened that I’m the kind of person who looks at my letters and slaps something down in the first couple of minutes. My dad, not have so much to take out of her English vocabulary chest usually took ten minutes to examine every single possibility. Since there were four of us playing, this made the game go on forever and after the first couple of hours I had a major tantrum and ended up leaving.

The last board game I played was about a month ago. My friend Leanard and I agreed to have a game by my next visit. By the time I paid him a visit again, we ended up playing the same board game, but the laptop game version, we set up the game for the four of us who were playing, and the laptop. When it wasn’t his turn. His brother, who is a master of computer games, particularly lost interest in the slow-paced board game. The game was fun, but somehow having someone checking e-mail on the side kind of detracted from the experience I remember playing the game with my mother when I was a kid.

Maybe that’s how games have evolved in this high tech world of ours. Kinda sad to lose that slow, lazy pace of spending a rainy afternoon lost in a game and trying real hard to finally beat your sister. Or those games that doesn’t totally entail spending your allowances to fancy game cards. Old games may tend to be bone breaking, but it’s from those experiences that you get to even reminisce more.