Being a suburban kid in 1990s America meant – especially if you were a boy, or a latchkey kid, someone whose parents were otherwise engaged, a boy with a basement or a den, who could walk home from school, or take the bus and plop down on the couch, or a neighbor’s couch, and while away the next four to five hours before adult supervision returned – that you were probably playing video games. A lot of video games. This was a grand experiment in how to capture the attention of seven-to-fourteen-year-olds, and we were the industry’s guinea pigs, lapping up every last ounce of Japanese dopamine deposited into our American cages, loitering at Gamestops, salivating over new releases. Console gaming exploded. Teenagers quickly migrated from the arcade to the couch, as Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and, later, Microsoft built increasingly fantastic worlds in our own homes, as serotonin-rich as any mall, without the need for quarters, and no one’s clammy hand sweat but our own ...

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