I would have been eight years old the first time I saw a video game. Mr. Allard, my grade two teacher, saw the future coming. He brought a Commodore PET into the classroom. The PET was the grandfather of the Commodore 64. It had minimal sound, exactly one screen colour--light green on dark green--and less memory than today's dollar-store pocket calculators. Nevertheless, there were games written for it, some of them educational in nature, and I can remember playing one of them during recesses. An addition problem was presented at the bottom of the screen and various possible solution numbers came floating down from the top. You had to shoot the right number before it hit the ground.
My father bought a Pong game soon after, and that was my first time playing a game that had no educational value whatsoever. Pong, for those of you under a certain age, was all the rage in the late seventies. It was table tennis, played with bleep-bleep sound and blocky graphics. The paddles were rectangles; the ball was a square, and this game was way cool, believe it or not. It was cool because you played it on a computer...what a concept!
Soon after Pong, Dad sprung for an actual computer system: a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer. I have fond memories of this machine: playing Monkey Kong, Castles, some kind of Space Invaders knockoff, and Wizards, a text adventure. How they crammed so much gameplay into 16K of memory is beyond me. These days, you can go to the dollar store and buy a pocket calculator with more memory than that. And the upwards of $2000--in 1982 dollars!--he spent on that would buy you a top-of-the line multimedia system in 2004, with enough money left over for a big screen TV.
My mother and stepfather, meanwhile, were still in the Atari 2600 era. Mom was the household champ at Space Invaders and Pac-Man both. I wasn't really very good at any of it, not that it stopped me from playing. And when a computer finally came to that house, an Atari 800XL, the games multiplied.
Oh, those were the days. If I sound like an old fogey, that's because I feel like one. The video games today have evolved farther than anyone from the eighties could have imagined. (Unless they ever played Dragon's Lair, the laserdisc game, in an arcade. That one was a decade or more ahead of its time.) But the ways in which they have evolved are disturbing, on a number of levels. First, of course, there are the Grand Theft Autos of the world, games that demand you kill police officers and, well, just about anyone else who gets in your way. Extra points for blowing out the back of somebody's skull.
I'll admit a bias here: I have never liked violence of any kind. pretend or otherwise. I used to burst into tears watching the Swedish Chef on the Muppets. No, I didn't think he was real; I knew the difference between television and reality. But I could still insert myself into the televised situation quite easily. I still do this today, in fact. Did the Swedish Chef HAVE to throw those pots and pans and plates around? If I ever tried that in real life I'd catch holy hell from on high. So how is that supposed to be funny, I ask you?
And I wouldn't feel right going around killing cops and molesting kids, or whatever it is you do in these games today. I wouldn't do any of this in real life--I'd never even think of doing any of this in real life. And yet kids today spend hours directing this filth. Is it any wonder that violent crime among teengers has skyrocketed since I was a child?
I still have simple taste in games. The kind of game I am most likely to enjoy is the kind of game that could be reverse-ported to a Commodore 64. Such games are all over the Internet now...three great sites for them are
www.addictinggames.com
www.ebaumsworld.com/games
www.popcap.com
We've bought a couple of games off popcap and have spent hours playing them. Thoroughly addictive. You don't need to learn a language to play them; there's no pull down menus and endless options. They're just...games.
And I think I'll go play one of them now.
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