#joy cons

Here is my contribution to the absolutely phenomenal Nintendo Switch Farewell collab hosted by ShyBubbers over on Twitter and Bluesky (which happened nearly three months ago... and I'm only now remembering to share this here lmao whoops my bad)

Not saying farewell to my own Switch quite yet but still, thank you for many years of great fun and games ❤️🎮

Is this still for kids? For families? I feel like this was designed more for adult gamers than for all-ages. I already know of quite a few people (young and old) who complain about the switch being too big, and we're just. Making it bigger? And oh we're... taking away the colors and hiding them under joysticks? Huh...

And I've seen some chatting about the new joycon attachment method, and while after arguing some of you might conclude they're not as breakable as they seem, how well is that going to hold up in a kid's hands?

I know these are systems for everyone but Nintendo is the only company that is still making consoles explicitly kid-friendly, and if they stop, who's going to pick up the slack? Idk man I feel like the more spaces we take away from these kids, the more they'll be relegated to either elsagate slop or stuff that's intended for people wayyyyy older, and that we're going to go further and further into a "why are the kids like this??" hole. The loathed gen alpha slang doesn't come from brainrot, it comes from them adopting slang from places they shouldn't necessarily be. Twitch streams, unsupervised youtube, etc. And where else are they to go? When you recognize that all of the modern kid's shows are garbage, and that there aren't really games being made for them, and that third spaces are going away, where are you expecting they go? What are you expecting they do?

"What happened to kid's media? We used to have (show you really like)" while there are, yes, a lot of big awful capitalistic forces at play there, the answer is also in part likely you or someone you know. Through a lot of adult intrusion and demanding in kid friendly spaces, a divide slowly gets created, where mature quality stuff is for big kids/adults, and kids stuff is therefore forced into being slop. You think kids were complaining about the switch being too small? That kids weren't a fan of the default joycons being colorful? That kids were pressuring Nintendo into making the Switch 2 more Steam Deck-like? I'm sure there are outliers, but I can't imagine the vast majority, many of which already had problems, for example, with holding the (to them) massive Switch, wanted this.