I was visiting my grandfather the other day for a game of Chess.
When I visit him, we usually play a game of Chess, talk a bit about what's going on in our lives (usually in his case nothing spectacular, and in my case most often something that goes beyond his view) and have some coffee in his living room.
However, the last few times I found him in the common area, playing Chess with one of the other people living there, and while I watched, there were other people as well, rambling about the old days, the war (WWII is a vivid memory for many people in homes for elders) , and playing games, mostly from their era.
This got me wondering; what would I do when I'm old, and in a similar situation?
I was raised with the oldfashioned games, like Monopoly, Risk,
Pachisi,
Shuffleboard and
Scrabble, and nowadays, I play games like
Settlers of Catan,
Carcassonne,
Robo Rally, and a host of other, more modern games.
But, I'm also a child of the Seventies, which means that I was just old enough when Atari, Commodore, Nintendo, Sega and Philips hit the market with their video games.
Now, I didn't have any of the consoles for myself back then (they were basically too expensive, so my mom wouldn't have it and I wasn't able to save a whole lot on an allowance of 2 guilders a week), but over the years, I came across a number of consoles. Our neighbour's son had an Atari 2600, we had a C64 and later on an MSX2 at school, a friend owned an Atari and another friend had an NES.
So you could say I played both old school and "new" stuff.
Therefor, I began to wonder; would future Homes harbour game consoles? Would they stick to board games, only to add some of the stuff we're playing today?
Or would they just keep the same old things for many years to come.
I don't know. All I know is that it'll (hopefully) take some years before I'm in the same position as my grandfather, and time is on our side.
Cheers, K.