[ WP ] It is 60 years in the future . Nursing homes have replaced bingo with LAN parties .

Some people find a lot of meaning in their first careers. I have a lot of friends who've moved on to graduate school, or to their first careers in network security, or began their first teaching jobs. As for me, I took the first job that would take me after I moved back home, which was a job running the entertainment center for the local senior living home. 
 
 
 As an avid gamer myself, I first floated the idea of doing a gaming room as a personal ploy. I'd get funding, build a system for work, and get to game in all of my off hours. I thought I was being clever -- how many of these seniors could possibly be up to date on the current gaming trends? I figured that none of the residents could even find the right way to put on a PSX headset. 
 
 
 A large portion of the residents here were born way back in the 90's and the early 00's, but some of them go all the way back to the 80's. Sometimes I find myself wondering what it would have been like to have a childhood without google, without the internet in general -- but these people grew up in a totally different world from me. You give any one of these seniors the chance to talk about life before the turn of the millenium and you can bet that they'll talk your ear off for an hour. One of the guys born in the 90's, in between loud groans at every death he suffered in Call of Duty, would wax poetic about his own grandfather, who was apparently a veteran of the real World War II. 
 
 
 At first it was just a few old men knocking on my doors asking me about obscure titles for a Playstation 2. As a teenager I actually had a huge emulator phase, so I had played a lot of the classic games that they mentioned. An older gentleman by the name of Daniel talked about how he had played every single final fantasy game since the first ones, and how in the USA they had had the numbers mixed up for a bunch of them. He let out an actual shriek when I told him how much I loved Final Fantasy 7. 
 
 
 I'm not sure if it was that conversation, but after that I started having multiple visitors a day, all asking me about different classic games. I started having daily coversations about Ocaraina of Time, about Goldeneye for the N64, about League of Legends and DOTA 2. I even got a history lesson from an avid Warcraft III player who described how the whole DOTA style e-sport was actually born of the Blizzard game Warcraft III ( apparently a predecessor of World of Warcraft! ). I had never realized it before, but a lot of the games I had tried out in fits of curiosity were the games that defined the genres for these residents. I found myself getting moved by the shared culture we had, so I started my work on the gaming center in earnest and ordered a bunch of computers. 
 
 
 At first my plan was to set up individual computers and have everyone connect online, like normal -- but when the written requests started coming in, it was n't for better specs on their computers, it was for the opposite. The residents did n't want to look at their own screens on their emulators, they wanted to play local, split-screen co-op. For my part, I was skeptical of why anyone would want to divide their screens like that, but when I saw my work paying off as they finally got together to play these classics on one screen, I started to feel like maybe there was something to their nostalgia. 
 
 
 It took me weeks on the internet looking through online postings to find two refurbished N64 systems to run ancient copies of Mario Kart and Goldeneye. It took even longer to find the original Nintendo brand controllers for them -- that was a nightmare. Digging through the Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo World, the Wii, I finally managed to find functional Gamecubes to satisfy the handful of residents who maintained that Super Smash Bros Melee was the greatest fighter of all time. I picked up a few classic Xboxes, but the re-released editions from 2051 for the 50-year anniversary, with Halo and Halo 2 pre-installed right on it. That one generated a lot of buzz. 
 
 
 At some point, before I knew it, I had been working here for years, playing these games and laughing with these old, mostly male, incredibly foulmouthed gamers. Just like I've gravitated over to the occasional split screen tournament with the residents, they've also asked me for advice with the new games that they've been playing on the equipment that I bought for them. It's funny -- these people really did grow up in a different world from the one I did, but the tide of the change video games brought to the world of entertainment still ebbs and flows today.
