Very strange to hear that. When I lived in China and Korea (I'd say Japan too but I was only there for 3 months) all my friends in those places who had kids didn't mind them playing games at all.

I've never met someone in any of the countries I have lived, including China and Korea, that didn't have their own computer.

You mean something like. I stopped keeping my passes after 2012. The box I keep them all in was getting full.

I'm glad my place wasn't the only one! An interesting read for sure.

That sounds really sad.

What an odd post, is there anything else you want to predict about me before I smash this down? Got it in yet (even just mentally counts). Ok.

Crazy, at my old school that'd be chased up. If there were any missed registrations the parents would be phoned during the day, and then a letter would go out at the end of the week. If some kid just rang up to say they weren't going in, that just wouldn't float it here.

Same. I don't know how it's possible to live like that.

If your call quality is as good as it is here, that'd be very difficult to pull off.

Sure thing, thought it's funny I do speak to some of the Kotaku staff via email after I got to know some after an interview at E3. I don't request bannings, I just follow the rules that they lay out. Kotaku is a much more tolerant site so if you go around calling someone a f***ot then you're going to be banned pretty…

I miss them too, there was just a higher quality of experience on older systems. In our case it was trying to bypass the measures put in place by the admins. Not to do anything malicious, just to see if it was possible.

Our school did, which is why some of us learned to hack it and bypass it. We found out the admins password which let us do anything we wanted. I doubt that kind of thing is possible now, though.

But then what about the police, your parents? Here if your child doesn't go to school they'll have to go to a detention centre, parents get fined and/or prosecuted. School's serious.

Maybe it's something from an older time. I was at public (paid) school from 89-95 and even in university in the 2000's they were never "labs".

Maybe. I just remember the two times I've been to an internet cafe, they weren't quiet! One was bolted onto a bar, though.

To work in animation? No way! I admire what they do but animation takes a certain level of power most mortals do not posses.

Is there one weird trick that I won't believe in order to get these?

That's the era I was at school- early 90's. I started at college in 95. I just never heard it referred to as a lab in either my school or college. At university it was referred to as a computer suite, no idea why. We just never had terms for them at my other places of education. Colloquially the "computer room" or…

We used to sneak out of the school grounds at lunch time though. Teachers would patrol the village, getting their own lunch or doing other stuff. But I knew how to sneak past them.

Crazy, I've never heard of that happening here. Basically the parents would be punished for it. That said there does seem to be more discipline here.