We Don't Earn the Right to Play Games Anymore, We Just Wait

This post, like most posts I make, is about society. Howerver, this post is came about while thinking about raising children.

I try and talk a lot about social aspects of games, not so much the games themselves. Really, what I try and talk about are the reasons why certain things are in games today. I am obsessed with the perception of reality through enlightenment thinking and i'm even more obsessed with the path of thinking that video games are going down.

I was thinking about a few things today. First, I was thinking about my first computer. the Timex Sinclair 1000. I loved this damn thing. It made me both love and hate programming. It also gave me the first taste I had of what a computer was. I mean, look at that thing, it's got tapes. What the hell, given what I know now, was that all about?

We don't really know anymore save those that want to know. Even at the time, we knew it was code sent to a disc through a tape recorder but we didn't know how or why. I remember having a Frogger game that said 16k of power. What does that mean? I have an idea, but at the time, I remember just sitting there in awe as I listened to the stead bweeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrr... of the code running its way through the machine. Eventually, I had Frogger.

Growing up, I had a nice Pong machine, followed closely by an Intellvision. I loved both of them. I really enjoyed playing Astrosmash with my Dad. I just sat there and pretended to be the little nose guy shooting boogers at bigger boogers. It was raining Boogers and only I could stop them.

It was around the time my parents bought us an NES that video games began to be too much for people. Atari had flooded their own market and the idea of a video game was going down hill, it was a fad for people, for kids in the end, and the era of the arcade in America began to dwindle.

Sitting now at the end of a long road, I can still remember the sense of awe and amazement I had at playing Contra. I remember playing it at my uncle Chuck's house. I wanted to know what happened, were the two guys going to kill all the aliens?



Video games have moved on, and up in a lot of ways, down in a lot of ways too. As with most things in capitalism, the growing complexity of coding a video game has mirrored the growing complexity of interpersonal communication and how the world works in general. Whereas before I was a nose flinging boogers at other boogers, i am now an angry man with a large sword hell bent on smashing an asteroid into another planet. I have more than just a nose, now I am a relatively realistic looking person with realistic aims, goals, patterns of behavior, and life points (you have life points, don't you?).

Kids enter into this world and are beset on all sides by things that are new, even to us who has the child. I asked once if we owe it to our children to play through games for them so they can play all of a game instead of the levels of a game that it comes with out of the box.

My thought on this is going back to the Timex Sinclair 1000 and thinking about just how hard I had to work to get the games to work. I would spend an hour and a half to play a game for 30 minutes. The part of it that was fun was seeing if the magic code I had written was ok. I also enjoyed looking through the game code for things that I could change. Could I make the B for bullet actually be an F?

As time went on, the console was fun but was not as interesting as the absolute terror that it was to load and play a game on a computer. Oregon Trail, when i was in Elementary School, I was allowed to play on occasion only because I had figured out how to make it work. I did this by lying about having the game at home and playing with it for a few weeks. 4th grade was a strange and wonderful time.

Here is my thought in a nutshell. When raising a child or even when wanting to get into thinking about video games, would a child be better off having not known the way games were made over the course of technological development. I realize that this could apply to anything, film, television, food technology, etc etc. I think certain things are fine to just accept as they are now. I, for one, never want to think about an old copy machine even though I know the same principles I am talking about exist in that old time copy machine.

The thing about it is that when the Timex Sinclair was around, when the Commodore 64 was around, when the Apple II was just coming about it took forever to get to play a game. Playing a game was a treat, it was a privilege. You earned it. That privilege has become waiting. We have to wait to play the game, not because it isn't installed yet, but because it has to bring the complexity of the last few years of driver changes and glitches. We don't earn anything on the new games, we just wait.

I have a pretty robust collection of old game systems. I have to wonder if I should try and teach my child how games developed as they develop through their important years. I wonder if I should try and shelter them from more complex electronics before I shove them out the door with a DSi or a PSP. Still, it just might happen that the child will become the soccer star I didn't.