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After the news story of the teenager beating the original game of Tetris went viral yesterday, and more notably the news anchor who was slammed for making the above comment and then telling him to “get outside”, this story hit me and sent me back to 2015.
The last time I was bullied “properly” (The later one was more covert) – I was told I had no life because I was a gamer. At the time, if you weren’t “married” to the job, the management didn’t want to know, but my community Nintendo North Wales had been running successfully for over 2 years by that point. (It celebrated it’s 11th birthday in November 2023)
Nintendo North Wales (NNW) was (and is) all about bringing people together in person to socialise and play games together as a community. For some that is their social life. For many it’s their safe space when they didn’t fit in anywhere else.
One of my passions has always been “Community” with the idea of belonging to something. Belonging and feeling at home.
That’s what Nintendo North Wales is. This extends to the larger hub Nintendo Players UK – it’s not just North Wales that has such a gaming community. There’s several similar communities across the UK and Ireland.
A lot of the communities were created on the inspiration from Streetpass as seen in the Nintendo 3DS. The principle of this was to get people to meet (be in proximity of each other) to swap things like puzzle pieces, weapons for quests, and simple notes in greetings messages. That’s how NNW started, and when the Switch launched in 2017 without this feature, we mourned its loss, but we were already together as a community, so we knew we couldn’t lose the connections we made just because the Streetpass function ceased to exist.
If you haven’t played Mario Kart in a room with up to 11 other players, you haven’t lived!
And what about Pokémon GO, or Pikmin Bloom? The whole idea of those were to get you OUTSIDE, and talking to other people…!
And for the haters out there, playing Video Games is just the same as watching your favourite football match. Everyone is entitled to like whatever they want to. If the choice was to go to Old Trafford or Nintendo HQ, you know which one I would pick 😉
Celebrating (Nintendo) gamers, the community, and the fun social life <3
https://www.nintendonorthwales.co.uk
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