Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. This old aphorism points to what is now the central pillar of our lives: boredom sucks. Staying busy seems the obvious remedy to boredom, but we often conflate busy with productivity because capitalism. “Productive” is better than “bored,” but still isn't “fun.” Video games are fun, and in 1980 Gunpei Yokoi, a brilliant Nintendo engineer who eventually designed the Game Boy, was inspired by a Herculean display of anti-boredom fun on a commuter train. He saw a fellow salaryman idly mashing his calculator and realized that if the millions of humans on the go every day get so bored they’re willing to play calculator masher, then a portable video game would captivate them (and their wallets). Thus, Nintendo’s Game & Watch was born.
