When I was ten, my family made a very first trip abroad to England. While we were there, one day, my mother and I visited my mother’s old friend who lived in London. After dinner, her elder son, who was about sixteen years old at the time, invited me to play a video game with him. He thought that I might have more fun playing with him than sitting with two adult ladies.
His video game was set up in the attic. As we walked up the stairs, I found a shiny decorative ball emanating white light in a dark room. When I stopped and exclaimed how beautiful it was, he laughed and said that it belonged to his younger brother.
Impressed, I continued my journey upstairs. Finally, we came into the attic, and he started setting up his video game. Truthfully, I had almost never played a video game before except for one occasion when I visited another friend of my mother in Tokyo and played a video game with her son about two years back.
Sitting on the attic floor, he showed me two options. One was a traditional-looking square-shaped piece and the other was a new-looking CD disk. I remembered that the video game I had once played before came in a square-shaped piece. So, I immediately chose the traditional-looking option.
“Oh, this is the oldest one!”
He laughed upon hearing my choice. But he nonetheless inserted the square piece into the player and started the game. It was an adventure game where we were supposed to make choices along the way as different characters came and gave us information.
I greatly liked the idea, but there was one problem. At the time, my English skill was very basic, and I couldn’t read sentences fast. As the characters came on the screen and their words were displayed, my elder friend tried to read it for me, but it was too fast and we simply couldn’t catch up with it.
After a while, he suggested that we should try the other game. Suddenly getting merry, he inserted the CD disk into the player. This game was completely visual. You were supposed to fly an airplane inside a funny-looking room avoiding any obstacle.
My elder friend said that he would first show me how to play it. Then he got so absorbed in it that he forgot to hand it over to me. Thus, for the next half an hour or so, I sat next to him, watching him fly the airplane avoiding the obstacles. I was simply impressed by his technique.
Finally, my mother and her friend came upstairs to pick me up. It was time for me and my mother to leave. I still didn’t understand why playing such a video game was so much fun, but the way this elder friend tried to play with me with so much effort that evening made it quite a special memory.