Did Video-games peak in 1989?

For all of humanity’s known existence we’ve always had some type of game or activity to keep our feeble monkey brain entertained. Around the 1980s was when video games started becoming popular, and we’ve obviously come pretty far in the video game industry, or did we?

The future can bring us forward but it can also take us back, and one of those situations is the video game industry, for every step we take forward, we go about 2-3 steps backward. But sometimes you need to take a step back to see the bigger picture, where it all matters. Of course I’m talking about the greatest strategy game ever made, Minesweeper.

This game gives you minimal information while still giving you enough information to get to where you need to go, much like real life. We often coast by in life with way less information than we’d like to have but if you take a minute to look at everything and keep level headed you can see the path that’s laid out for you. Although on rare occasions there are times it gives you a spot where you can’t know for certain what you need to do, where you must trust in the heart of the cards and guess. Sometimes you guess right and keep moving forward, and other times you guess wrong and have to start over. Just like real life these moments are the most annoying because the human brain doesn’t like feeling helpless, you’d often rather think that you just messed up than think you couldn’t have done anything differently. Because in one scenario you feel like you can improve and learn to do something better next time, while in the other scenario you don’t feel like you learned anything, you feel helpless because something went wrong and there was nothing you could’ve done to change it. But always remember that just like Minesweeper you can always restart, you can always take a minute to step back and look at the playing field to decide your next move, and if that move was wrong then you might get set back, but you can just keep 

moving forward. At the end of the day a wrong move is better than no move at all.

Minesweeper is a complex game disguised as a simple game, which makes an initial approach seem terrifying but once you take that first step it starts to get easier. Upon first look it seems to be just a bunch of numbers and hidden mines and almost no way to know what you’re doing, but on further inspection you can see that if you take a minute you can figure out where you need to go. Much like real life there are paths that are clear and paths aren’t so clear. If you move too fast and you don’t take your time to look around you’ll hit a mine and everything blows up in front of you. So always remember to take your time in life, look around every now and then, enjoy the view, smell the roses because you never know when the chance will come around again. So enjoy every moment while you can.