When I Stole 1000 Games And Got Exactly What I Deserved

How infinite choice turned my Nintendo DS into a paperweight

Photo by Colin Davis on Unsplash

Sometime around 2008, I think it was, I owned a Nintendo DS — one of the big, gray, original launch models, brick-thick, with all the elegance of a clamshell sandwich box. This thing:

Ah, the o.g. Nintendo DS. I was in my 30s when this came out, and truth be told I never really “vibed” with Nintendo gaming, but so many games on this were next-level quality. When I actually played them.

Magnificent, isn’t it? I loved it — despite my entire game library at first consisting of only about 3 games. I had some Air Traffic Control management thing that I liked, and a couple of the Advance Wars titles that I loved.

I played those three carts to death. Deep absorption, multiple hours, days, weeks and months of rapt immersion. A good game can be like a good book. You live inside it. The experiences you have there become part of you.

Then I got one of those R4 carts.

And everything fell apart.

It’s about piracy

For the uninitiated: the R4 Revolution for the DS was a flash cartridge that fit into the DS game slot. It allowed you to run essentially any DS game ROM from a microSD.

Even in 2008 (or whenever it was), it was pretty easy to find every DS game ever released, available for nothing, and pack them onto a card the size of a fingernail.

This was piracy. I knew this. I did it anyway, because I could, and because I told myself the usual things people tell themselves when they do the things they want to do.

The good news is that I didn’t prosper from it.

Having the R4 killed my DS gaming within days.

Not physically. The hardware was fine. The games all worked. What died was my desire to play any of them.

I had — I think — a literal thousand games. (It might “only” have been several hundred.) I would load one up and play it for five minutes. And whether I enjoyed it or not, I’d think: somewhere in this mammoth library there will be something better than this.

It always seemed that I should play something else. Then, I’d play five minutes of the next thing, and think the same thought again.

The Advance Wars games that had held me for months — that had been sufficient on their own — were suddenly just two items in an undifferentiated mass of possibility. They lost their specific gravitational attraction for me. Everything did.

I eventually stopped picking the DS up at all.

Don’t be fooled by the graphics. Advance Wars is some serious strategy. Not right up there with the most neckbeardy titles, but high enough to scratch the itch.

This thing I’m saying here is not an original observation. The paradox of choice has been well-documented since at least Barry Schwartz put it in those exact words in 2004.

But knowing about a phenomenon doesn’t inoculate you against it. What my R4 experience gave me was a clean, personal demonstration that scarcity had been doing invisible work all along in creating value.

Having only 3 games meant those 3 games mattered. Each was weighted with significance, because it was one of a few. Replace 3 things of interest with 1000 potential things of interest, and personal investment doesn’t scale. It doesn’t even survive. It collapses.

We are doomed, for real this time

The same collapse is everywhere now, at grand civilizational scale.

Streaming platforms offer more film and television than any person could watch in several lifetimes. People’s response to this abundance is not, broadly speaking, joyful, rapturous consumption. It’s indifference.

And scrolling. Thirty minutes of scrolling to select something, then half-attention to whatever was eventually chosen, interrupted by frequent thoughts that there’s probably something better to pay attention to somewhere else.

There almost certainly isn’t. But the possibility that there might be is now always present, and that possibility is corrosive to commitment.

The experience of watching something has been contaminated by the experience of considering whether to watch something else, which never ends.

When you can watch anything you want, you don’t want to watch anything.

Books have gone the same way. The Internet and ubiquitous pocket computers mean that anyone with a device has access to more literature than could be read in ten lifetimes.

The observable consequence is that people either read less, or not at all — or (and this is my solution) they re-read the books that they first read and loved when books were scarcer — when having a single book on the go was just part of life, rather than an item in an infinite list.

The re-reader is attempting to recover a relationship formed under different conditions, before the weight of unchosen alternatives made every choice feel regrettable.

And as for the phone itself. Walk down any street and count the people walking-and-scrolling. Not reading or watching anything in particular, but scrolling. Just a few years ago, you’d only see these public scroller-strollers occasionally. Now it’s a common way that people occupy themselves between one place and another.

The gesture itself is the activity. The content is incidental. They move restlessly through their fields of possibility the way I moved through my R4 library, looking for the thing that would finally feel worth stopping for.

It never comes, because the act of looking has replaced the act of finding.

I eventually gave away that o.g. phat Nintendo DS, with the R4 cart still in it. I felt nothing. I got a DS Lite a couple of years later, sans R4, with a single game: Advance Wars. It was, predictably, excellent. The value brought by scarcity had come back, artificially, by choice.

This is not a moral argument against abundance. It’s a description of what abundance actually does to us, which is different from what we assume it will do to us.

We assume it will mean more pleasure. The R4 cart was supposed to give me everything. What it actually gave me was nothing, very efficiently, and all at once.