I loved it. I loved all of it: the color, the stylus that came with it, the bag I had bought for it to take it with me wherever I went, the looks of it, and how grown-up I felt when using it since I could surf the web with it and it looked similar to a laptop. I am talking about my bright red Nintendo DSi. The games you could play on it did not have the most of my attention – it was the connection to others that intrigued me.
For those who might not have had a Nintendo or need a little help recalling the memories: there were multiple ways of connecting to others via this little-kid-computer. First, you could upload your photos to Facebook. I know that that was an option, but you really should not ask me how, since I did not have Facebook (for a long time I have wondered – I still do, actually – who that option was made for. Facebook users need to be 13 years or older, and I think – I admit, it is a guess – that the average Nintendo owner was younger than 13.) Second, there was an application called PictoChat. Nowadays, we would laugh about the functions it had, since they were so few: you could type a text, write a text using the stylus, and write a text using the rainbow-colored pen. That was it. You can imagine: more than enough for a kid with the age of around ten years old in around 2010. I remember ‘hanging out’ with my classmates after school chatting with each other, even though it would be way more convenient to just talk to each other since you had to sit almost directly next to each other for the chat to work.
All good things come in threes, and since the digital world is supposedly a good thing, there is still one digital function left to talk about. For me, it was the function I used most when I had outgrown the games where I had to feed my horses. It was the Nintendo DSi Browser. ‘Use’ is actually not the best way to phrase the way I spent my time on this application, it was rather something like ‘trying to use’, because a lot of websites did not work on the little-kid-computer. I can recall a website with the name MovieStarPlanet (mostly shortened to MSP) that consumed a lot of my time. Users were ‘represented’ using an avatar and could chat with each other in chatrooms with names that resembled the real world such as ‘lunchroom’ and ‘café’.
That connection between the ‘real’ world and the online world was still strong in the time of the Nintendo. To be able to chat with each other, the two of you had to be close to each other physically for the devices to connect and the internet was not as expanded as it is now. It gave a feeling we could call something like ‘gezellig’ in Dutch (the word is hard to translate to English, but it would be something like ‘cozy concerning people’). The Nintendo gave me the possibility to get to know the digital world, without it being an unsafe place for me to be since websites that contained mostly images or videos simply did not work. They still do not work. Since my bright red Nintendo DSi is a device I was keen on back in the day, I was careful with it and it is still at my parents’ place in the drawer where I left it the last time. It still turns on. It still connects to the WiFi. Instagram still does not work on it.
It is sad but has to be said: my very much cherished device is relatively way less useful than I thought it was when I was ten.
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