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I'm 42 years old, and my mother still asks me to fill out a Christmas list on Thanksgiving like a little boy because shut up. (A middle-aged man can be hard for a mum to shop for.)
Anywho, she told me that she couldn't find one of the presents on my list: SimCity 5. They've strangled most of the bugs out of it following its disastrous release, and I couldn't think of anything I wanted on my list apart from a couple of books and a kitchen toy, so I padded it with a few video games. It wasn't a priority; I wasn't going to get to any new games until I'd capped out on Warlords of Draenor, but I played crazy amounts of SimCity 4.
Apparently, my mother, whose last video gaming experience was Wizardry II thirty years ago, had the misfortune to go into a shop with a clueless proprietor not long after the release of The Sims 4. From the way she related it, it sounded as if the clerk confused SimCity 5 with The Sims 4.
According to Mum, the clerk was adamant that SimCity 5 didn't exist yet, despite the headline-making previously-cited disastrous release. Since I went to Gamestop a couple of times during the shopping season and took note of the massive Sims 4 displays, I realized that the clerk was trying to sell Mum on a copy of The Sims 4, insisting that that's what I MUST have meant, despite the heavy documentation I supplied my mum (and she supplied the clerk) that what I was looking for was SimCity 5.
I can't word-for-word the narrative, but I'm convinced, the way that my mother described it, that the clerk either confused those two EA Games (leaving my mother wondering whether she was the one who was confused) or was thinking that no one would be dumb enough to buy a copy of SimCity 5 and I must have meant something else and the poor senior citizen standing in front of her was just all a-fuddle and he was trying to save me from a disastrous mistake on her part. For the record: my Mum does not fuddle.
I've had a little experience with game store clerks treating older players like the March of the Clueless in the past, and I'm actually starting to drift into that age myself. I find that it helps to orate knowledgeably about gaming prior to asking any questions, the better to get shop managers to take me seriously. As a followup, I might find out what store she used - probably that crappy one near the University, with all the shopping centers around - and buy all my games online henceforth.
Anywho, she told me that she couldn't find one of the presents on my list: SimCity 5. They've strangled most of the bugs out of it following its disastrous release, and I couldn't think of anything I wanted on my list apart from a couple of books and a kitchen toy, so I padded it with a few video games. It wasn't a priority; I wasn't going to get to any new games until I'd capped out on Warlords of Draenor, but I played crazy amounts of SimCity 4.
Apparently, my mother, whose last video gaming experience was Wizardry II thirty years ago, had the misfortune to go into a shop with a clueless proprietor not long after the release of The Sims 4. From the way she related it, it sounded as if the clerk confused SimCity 5 with The Sims 4.
According to Mum, the clerk was adamant that SimCity 5 didn't exist yet, despite the headline-making previously-cited disastrous release. Since I went to Gamestop a couple of times during the shopping season and took note of the massive Sims 4 displays, I realized that the clerk was trying to sell Mum on a copy of The Sims 4, insisting that that's what I MUST have meant, despite the heavy documentation I supplied my mum (and she supplied the clerk) that what I was looking for was SimCity 5.
I can't word-for-word the narrative, but I'm convinced, the way that my mother described it, that the clerk either confused those two EA Games (leaving my mother wondering whether she was the one who was confused) or was thinking that no one would be dumb enough to buy a copy of SimCity 5 and I must have meant something else and the poor senior citizen standing in front of her was just all a-fuddle and he was trying to save me from a disastrous mistake on her part. For the record: my Mum does not fuddle.
I've had a little experience with game store clerks treating older players like the March of the Clueless in the past, and I'm actually starting to drift into that age myself. I find that it helps to orate knowledgeably about gaming prior to asking any questions, the better to get shop managers to take me seriously. As a followup, I might find out what store she used - probably that crappy one near the University, with all the shopping centers around - and buy all my games online henceforth.
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