Hacking away at childhood cheat codes
Have we gone a bit too far with adopting lifehacks?
If you’re a child of the 80s or early 90s, the above image should either be instantly recognisable or — at the very least — cause you to bang your head against the wall in frustration over its familiarity:
That’s right: if you’ve ever owned or played a NES, Sega Mega Drive — or any cartridge-based video game console — this is the image that greeted you if the connection between the game and console stuffed up.
And how did we fix it?
Easy: we took the game out and blew on the connectors.
Ta-da.
This was THE solution and no one ever doubted it.
An article investigating whether “blowing into Nintendo Cartridges really helped” caused me to tumble down this rabbit hole of reminiscence. It took me back to a simpler time of countless hours whiled away collecting coins, descending pipes, saving princesses and power-up-ing my way to childhood obesity and early onset RSI.
As kids we couldn’t tell you where babies came from or explain why cartoon characters who never wore pants came out of the shower with a towel around their waist…but we could tell you with absolute certainty that we knew how to fix a video game when it wasn’t working properly.
It was the first lifehack that we learnt: handed down from brother to brother; sister to cousin; socially-awkward-Asian to weird-European-exchange-student-who-stayed-with-you-that-one-semester-in-primary-school…and — erm — other permutations of a non-specific nature.
When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System, sometimes my games wouldn’t load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help?
[Nintendo’s warning: “Do not blow into your Game Paks or systems. The moisture in your breath can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors.”]
This sums up the problem: although intellectually we knew that blowing into electronics was bad, we did it anyway. It seemed to work… [But] my money is on the blowing thing being a pure placebo, offering the user just another chance at getting a good connection. The problems with Nintendo’s connector system are well-documented, and most of them are mechanical — they just wore out faster than expected.
This article shakes the very foundations of one of the central video game tenets of faith that I — and every person of a certain age — has upheld as gospel.
Now you might think I’m being a tad bit melodramatic, but learning this is on par with that fateful day when I watched Transformers: The Movie and realised, with dawning horror, that Optimus Prime actually can (and does!) die.
Worse still, it makes me realise all that wasted oxygen and self-inflicted light-headedness was for nothing.
Press “Start” to continue…
More importantly, this got me thinking about how this may have influenced our quest for lifehacks in adulthood.
It makes me wonder if our unquestioning childhood acceptance has caused us to subconsciously confuse tested truths with anecdotal evidence in certain areas of life.
We get so caught up in finding the top 10 ways to de-clutter or the best email client for our iPhone that we end up spending more time searching for “the perfect lifehack” to maximise efficiency than we do on actually getting things done. More than that, we jump to implement these proposed solutions and accept them as true without actually checking if it’s been proven.
Will we one day look back at the “effective lifehacks” we’re applying today as nothing more than childish placebos?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that…
But what I can tell you is that if your PC ever freezes up, just try turning it off and on again.
Works every time.
This post originally appeared (with 15% more absurdity) at Remixed Metaphors.
