Before we begin, I have a small confession to make...

I'm not actually that good at games. I'm sort of universally average, but I've never really managed to cross over the line into the realms of "good" - it's the reasons for my averageness that we're going to examine today. Come with me as we take a few further steps with my boyish self.

My stamping ground as a child was a small wasteland called Abbots Langley just outside of Watford, which is itself a slightly larger wasteland just outside of London. Abbots Langley was a two church, two pub, two school sort of village which managed the tricky feat of being neither town nor country, being too built up to be one and too remote to be the other. Once upon a time it may have been a fairly idyllic place, but sometime between 1930 and 1960 it had transformed into a rather average council estate.

Suffice to say, there were no arcades in Abbots Langley...

In fact, of the places available to an enquiring 11 year old, there were no arcade games at all in Abbots Langley.

Before I managed to talk my Mum into buying a Sinclair Spectrum, my only regular contact with video gaming was during the weekly visit to the aforementioned Rolls Royce Sports and Social club and on the occasional school visit to the ice skating rink.

I would save up my 10p's, scrounged by doing the shopping for my Nan at 3p a go - she was still stuck in old money at this point and was convinced that thruppence was a sizable amount of dosh for the task of carting a weeks worth of shopping the mile and a half from the local supermarket - and the classic tactic of annoying people until they gave me money to go away.

So, when I was let loose anywhere that had arcade machines I would fall upon them like a starving man at a finger buffet. I would have one or two games on everything, trying to stretch my pocket full of change as far as it could possibly go. I would play a game until I figured out how it worked and then would move on to the next, in the process becoming the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades. I could play Phoenix well enough to beat the first flag, I could get through most of Scramble, I was the lord of the first level of Donkey Kong, I could clear a few sheets of most Invaders clones, I was promoted to Space Captain in the wars against the Gorfian empire and I could even survive for a few hectic minutes on Defender. But I hardly ever scored maximum bonus points and I rarely troubled the high score tables.

But it wasn't lack of practice that did for me, it was lack of competition...

Almost all of my formative arcade experiences were solo. Whether it was because I was killing ten minutes in a chip shop in St Albans, or because I was too tall and ungainly to actually go ice skating (well, that was my excuse and I'm sticking to it) or because 50p was enough to give my Mum half an hours peace while she was trying to chat to her mates at the social. I was mostly playing alone, a trend that was only reinforced when the Spectrum came into the house when I would spend hours mapping Jet Set Willy, or trying to find the Lunar Rover...

It was only years later, when my under-age drinking partners and I discovered R-Type in our local, that the spirit of competition really reared it's head. Spurring each of us to be the first to complete the next stage. Each boss that was defeated, every level that was completed at 100%, every little pattern learnt was a major victory. I never did complete R-Type but I got as far as I did only because of the competition with KEV, IAN and BAZ. R-Type eventually gave way to the fresh challenge of Flying Shark and then we were allowed in proper pubs and our little competition went the way of all flesh...

It's competition that drives us to be good at games, whether it's winner-stays-on at Street Fighter, holding the high score at Defender, being the first on the block to own a Gamecube, grabbing a medal position in the Llamasoft Lleague or just the I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-betterness of getting half a round further in R-Type than your best mate. Without it, the games that we love are nothing more than glorified jigsaw puzzles - pretty pictures to divert our attention until something better comes along.

Cheers
Chris

You can add your thoughts on this story in the forum