This story is part of a series by 1843 magazine on the ongoing shortages caused by pandemic-related supply chain glitches. Read about everything from dognapping and bikes to IKEA shoe racks and chicken.
My mother and father believed that video games would ruin my life. Which is something to think about when I’m at my writing desk and look over my left shoulder to a wall of 446 video games, arranged like paperbacks on 34 shelves in a cabinet six-feet wide by five-and-a-half-feet tall. In the alphabetised vastness of this collection, I see my parents trying to shoo me away from “Super Mario Bros.”, begging me to go outside. It was 1986, and I was seven years old. They were both educators, both from poor families in the Bootheel of Southeast Missouri, and by the time I was born they’d saved enough money to move out of a trailer and into…
