“There you are again,” cries the lady. “Come with me.” The lad of about twelve gets up and winks at his friend as his mother drags him home by his collar.[break]
That parent was desperate. But remember Super Mario, Contra, and Street Fighter? All these games make us recall the moments when our parents too had to summon us an awful lot of times before we could get ourselves to pause the game even for a few fractions of a second.
The console games sowed seeds of gaming habit in us; and as the technology got better, the games just got more tempting.
Now it’s the PC games taking over. Moreover, with online and LAN (Local Area Network), games like Counterstrike, WoW (World of Warcraft ), DotA (Defense of the Ancients), and FIFA, gamers flock together creating a whole new dimension of the gaming cult.
“I’ve been playing LAN games for five years now, and yes, it can get addictive sometimes. I once played for 24 hours nonstop when I was in Malaysia,” says Lajan Awale, a pro-gamer who’s won several local DotA tournaments with his team W’SUB.
“But unlike other addictions, we surely can keep checks on our limits to get things under control.” he says.
For gamers like Lajan, the gaming world is a virtual reality they live off. They have a network of virtual friends who know each other only with their pseudo game names. When it comes to being teammates in a game, they share camaraderie as authentic as real-life friendship.
Abroad, online game tournaments are spectacles where contenders battle head-to-head in an arena filled with hundreds of spectators, reaching for grand prizes heavily sponsored. Here, the tournaments are small in scale, organized mainly by local cyber cafes and game zones.
But with tournaments being organized as often as once every three months in Kathmandu, the gaming community here is also thriving to match upto the international gaming scenes.
The gaming zones in the capital open around 10 in the morning till late in the evenings. The places are always filled with young crowd who spend hours playing games, or just watching over.
“We play around two to three games whenever we have time, and that takes like maybe three hours.” says Bikesh Maharjan, as he leaves the Online Café, his regular gaming junction. “But I’ve been at it continuously for six hours, and it also depends on how much pocket money I have,” he adds.
Now, with increasing availability of Internet access at home, there are even lesser restrictions. So it’s no surprise that Nepali youngsters are more often gaming into the night and till early mornings.
Definitely with the heavy load shedding schedules, it’s cut down their gaming sessions. It’s a curse for them but parents must be thankful for the outage.
Gaming is fun, and it’s taken over other sources of entertainment for many youngsters. But limitations have to be set as studies show that online gaming does get in the way of academic priority.
Moreover, online gaming is extensive and easily accessible, too. So setting age limits or creating laws is completely unfeasible. So we need to seek ways to assist youngsters and parents in responsible gaming because it’s just not always possible for parents to be dragging their kids off their seats each time.
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