Raising in 90s - Personal Essay

It seems like only yesterday when I first picked up the rectangular controller that came along with my SNES. I was probably 5, barely able to read and articulate, but I distinctly remember how after hours and hours of playing I could feel the pinging in my hands and simply could not put that controller down. I thought "Who cares! I have to kill these little turtles until I can throw a giant turtle into a pit of lava and save the princess!'. I think many of you have felt this way; the very first time I beat the game I felt an electric shock of euphoria, I felt I had accomplished the impossible, I would brag to all my friends about how it only took me one try to beat the game (though the actual number was close to 40...). I remember the heartbreak when a couple of years later the game cartridge could not start, no mater what I did, I could not bring it back to life... until an idea suddenly crept in the back of my head... I blew with all my might inside the cartridge and... Eureka! My beloved game was back to life! I felt like the smartest engineer in all of history, I felt I could trail the colossal mountains in midst snow; for that brief little moment of my young life... I felt like a king.

I am sure we, who grew up in the video game explosion of the 90s, can reminisce fondly and fill our eyes with nostalgia at our first experience with the video game world we grew up in. But in recent years, the video game industry has seen an explosion that other sources of media can only dream of. Since the early 1990s to 2014, there has been a 500 percent increase in the industry, going from 4.7 billion to 22.41 billion dollars. Not only that, but no longer are video games aimed for the young and teenagers; they now target much older audiences with the average age of the male gamer being a whopping 35 years old. Besides this shocking number, there has been numerous studies that link excessive gaming time in adults  with higher levels of depression, higher body mass index (BMI) as well as other mental and physical issues. If you had told these numbers to someone ten to fifteen years ago, they would have likely answered that these near middle-aged men were losers and had no life, however we have seen a shift where not only is gaming normalized  but nerd culture is now "cool". Grown men are now pretty much extending and preserving their infancy and adolescence until their early to late 40s. But why? Why is this happening? has the economy taken a dive and hence men seek accomplishment in games? or is it the other way around?

There is no denial that Millennials have seen raised in a very tumultuous time, we've experienced the loss of job sectors, economic crash, terrorism, the rise of globalism, etc. However, it seems that we have lost the meaning of industry and self discipline that generations before us had. According to the differences between generations, Millennials are much more integrated with technology and have a different view of what it means