Had a thought about gifted kid things today.
It’s like when you speedrun through a game, but glitchless. You skip all the side quests, you just focus on the main plot line, and you get all this praise for it. “Look at you go! You’re so good at this, you’re so far ahead.” You’re told this is how you play the game.
So then you beat the game. You win! You’re one of the first ones to beat it. You talk about it with…
Nobody. Cause no one else has beat it. But. That’s okay, you were praised and loved, you did it right. You’ll just wait and…
The others finish the game, and talk about all these characters you don’t know. These plot lines you’ve never heard of.
And then the sequel comes out after you’ve been waiting for years, and years, and years, and you know you’ll be able to speed through again, to get that praise-
Only the sequel is about those plot lines you’ve never heard of — and all the mechanics are completely different.
You have so much anger, you shout, “I was never taught any of this! How can they expect me to play?”
And the callous, eye-rolling response is, “Maybe you should’ve played the game properly the first time. This is just like that one side quest. The game tried to push you that way, so why didn’t you play it the way you were supposed to?”
And you just stop playing games, because you thought you knew how… and now you don’t.
Anyways.
