PlayStation3 is my childhood

Being born in 2004, I have many memories of digital technology seeping into my life. These memories encapsulate a moment of time from my childhood, involving TVs, game consoles and later on phones. The first device I remember have a grasp on is PlayStation 3.

In my family, we did not have a DVD player. We used the PS3 as a DVD player and a game console. The first movie I was obsessed with as a child was the movie Cars. I remember the movie to an extreme detail. As told through my parents, they would put the Cars on every day and always skip the scene when Lighting McQueen got lost in the middle of the night, because I would start crying. I remember watching the movie as a teenager and I can still feel the shock I felt when I saw that scene for the first time. I couldn’t believe how much I hate it as a kid.

The family PS3 played a big role in my relationship with my sister. As we grew older, we started playing games. Our favorite game was The Little Big Planet. This game is a core part of my childhood. It is about a little puppet doll that has to save the world through puzzles and parkour. It is a multiplayer game. I can never forget the arguments with my sister who would get the controller number one. The best part about this whole game for us was not the story or the game play (looking back at it now, it is really awesome). What was the most important was the feature of dressing up your little character. You could change anything and everything. Sitting super close to the TV and picking outfits for the characters, yelling about one of us taking too much time and figuring out how to make the character punch each other was the peak of the game.

The console slowly became a part of the family. We still have it under the TV with all the cables and controllers even when we haven’t used it in so long. We don’t use it as a DVD player either as we have Apple TV. The PS3 has been replaced by other technology but we still keep it, why is that?

I think we still have the console as a keepsake of out childhoods, the time that we can’t have back and of the memories that the PS3 gave us. Me and my family are not the first or the last people to feel emotional attachment to inanimate objects. In a society driven by purchases and consumerism, it feels weird to feel guilty for replacing objects. Objects nowadays are made to be replace in a year or two. But people spend their money on these objects and technologies, have memories with them and in a year you have to replace it? It doesn’t sit right with me.

I can remember the PS3 getting older with me. I can hear the whirl of the cooler getting louder every year, I feel the heat of the console every time we would turn it on. Replacing it is like replacing a part of my childhood. Maybe it is not that bad to keep technologies that have been long made better if they remind you of good memories.