调查：你曾经进口过电子游戏吗？
Poll: Have You Ever Imported A Video Game?
Time Extension 作者 Damien McFerran 发起“你是否曾进口电子游戏”读者调查，探讨欧美玩家 importing games 的普遍度。他自 1990 年购入日版 Mega Drive 起持续购买 import games，并借 Switch 无区域锁购入日本独占游戏。他认为社交平台上“进口游戏在西方几乎不存在”的说法与其个人经历不符。
It's an import-ant question
by Damien McFerran- Yesterday, 4pm
Social media is, for me, an utterly fascinating tool because it not only brings like-minded people together to share their passion for certain topics, but also exposes you to individuals who, for one reason or another, seem to have lived a very different reality from your own.
The topic I found myself embroiled in this week was importing video games, something that has been a huge part of my own experience with interactive entertainment.
My first console was an imported Japanese Mega Drive back in 1990, a time when all of the mainstream UK video game magazines covered import titles regularly. Ever since then, I've continued to purchase import games – the lack of region lock-out on Switch has enabled me to pick up some really cool Japanese exclusives I might otherwise have missed, for example.
However, the debate on social media saw a small proportion of people claim that import gaming barely factored into their personal experience, a fair comment, I would argue, since I know many people who have never touched games from outside their home region.
What struck me as odd was that some of the participants in this conversation were adamant that import gaming was almost nonexistent in the West, or that it was some kind of niche-within-a-niche that people might have been vaguely aware of but never actually took part in.
That simply doesn't match my personal experience: I was lucky enough to live close to more than one indie import store back in the '90s, and I even visited the now-buried Birmingham CeX regularly to pick up Japanese PS1, N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast titles.
Nonetheless, I felt it was my duty to open the floor to see whether I was truly an outlier in the world of gaming, and whether I might be wrong to assume that importing games was as commonplace as it was in my friend group growing up.
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Damien has been writing professionally about tech and video games since 2007 and oversees all of Hookshot's sites as Editorial Director. He's also the editor-in-chief of both Time Extension and Hookshot's latest site, Steam Hype.
来源：Time Extension · timeextension.com