Anyone that owned a game that operated with cartridges knows all about ‘blowing the dust’ out of the inside, right? If the game wasn’t working, meaning that it looked all messed-up when it was turned on, then, of course, the problem was that it was dusty and needed to be blown off, so a lot of us, if not all of us, would take a deep breath and blow it out. The only problem here is that if dust really had been getting up inside the cartridge we would have had bigger problems since it’s likely that the cartridge wouldn’t have worked, or it would have corrupted the console at some point. In fact, it’s fair to say that blowing inside the console would have a better chance of causing any issues than dust would. As the video explains, this post-hoc fallacy occurs when we simply believe that because something happened after we intervened, we tend to believe that we did something right and made a difference. The problem is that we didn’t do anything other than play an epic game of follow the leader since the issue was usually pretty easy to solve by inserting the cartridge again and turning the console on. It might have taken a few times, but unless something was truly screwy it would have worked. But given how the brain works it’s not too hard to figure out that we are kind of bound by patterns and want to think that what we do makes a difference at times, especially when it’s something that fixes or justifies something.
There are bound to be some folks that would claim that they’re not bound by patterns, but the truth is that whether a person likes it or not our natural default is to seek some sort of order to get a solid base under us and make it known that we have some grasp of what’s going on. People want to know that their life and their efforts matter, and while it might sound a bit grandiose with the matter at hand, blowing into a game cartridge is a way to show some form of dominance since it’s a human being taking care of a problem that they perceive is stopping them from enjoying one form of pleasure. But instead of running on trial and error a lot of us simply blew into the cartridge since we’d seen someone else do or heard that it was what worked. Unless a person’s mouth was completely dry and hopefully free of any food particles, it’s likely that a lot of people might have been unintentionally spewing food and moisture throughout the interior of the cartridge, which would explain why some of them stopped working after a while. At least with the games we have now that’s not exactly a problem. If someone did try blowing on a disc to make it work it’d be time to just shake your head and wonder who dropped the ball on that one.
Games have evolved quite a bit throughout the years, as have the consoles, and it’s fair to say that the ‘dusting’ practices have gone the way of the dinosaur since most people don’t even use them any longer. Those that still do might be in the habit after all this time, but it’s kind of easy to understand since old habits are hard to break after all. This is a pretty good example of monkey-see, monkey-do as some might say considering that this used to the tried and true method to fixing a game, outside of sending it to a technician of course. Banging on a Nintendo console never really had the same effect as banging on a TV did, since it was more likely that a person would break the console than to convince it to work. Even a TV could only take so much abuse, but the much more fragile NES could barely take a solid knock to the plastic casing before things started getting broken and possibly scrambled beyond belief. Violence and technology aren’t always the best bedfellows after all. But as things continued to evolve the act of dusting a cartridge became less of a habit since with the evolution of the Nintendo the idea that blowing in the cartridge was the best idea slowly began to fade out.
It’s hard to say what happened really, but it could be that people started to figure out that it didn’t really work, or perhaps they just stopped doing it. Whatever really happened it’s actually nice to know that it doesn’t happen at all these days. Dusting a disc or a game card, such as those that go into the Nintendo Switch, would be pretty funny to see really, and would likely cause a slight loss of faith in humanity for whoever had to witness it.
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