7.
A World Without...
I am rapidly approaching the halfway point of
my allotted three score years and ten, and I have spent most of
my time on this rock playing, thinking about and attempting to
write videogames. And I certainly don’t intend to stop now.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before
I begin, I have something to confess – I don’t really
‘do’ television. It’s there, and it gets watched
very occasionally, but I don’t sit down in the evening and
watch the thing – after all, that’s valuable gaming
time. Which is why, on a recent trip to the cinema, I was, in
grand Daily Mail style, disgusted by an advert.
This thing starts with a shot of a kid playing
some no-rate karting game with a dull, listless stare. Dad peeks
around the corner in horror and pisses off to the garage. The
shot then fades to Dad, pushing his seemingly happy son down a
hill in the sort of soap-box racer that only ever existed in the
stunted imaginations of American kids’ tv producers. This
then cuts to the tagline telling us that we shouldn’t accept
less than second best.
“Yes, Dad. It’s great.
Can I have my PlayStation back, now?”
Now, maybe I’m too sensitive, but this
bloody advert annoyed me intently. The implication is clear –
video games are sick and wrong, they’re bad for our health
and are corrupting our youth. I, as a respectable middle-class,
middle-aged parent, am expected to go: “Gosh! My kids are
stuck inside playing computer games when they should be out in
the fresh air doing healthy things!”
All of which got me wondering what it would
be like living in the 21st century without videogames –
not just where we don’t have access to them, but where they
never existed in the first place. Would it be, as this advert
is trying to tell us, a better place?
Our world, everything that we take for granted,
is only made possible because of cheap, powerful computing devices.
Computers are everywhere – in our offices, our homes, our
cars and our schools. They make credit cards possible, they control
the food that appears on our shelves, they allow us to buy books
from America and toys from Japan and they allow us to see and
hear world events pretty much as they happen. Without computers,
the 21st century wouldn’t exist.
Defender/Robotron designer Eugene Jarvis famously
said: “The only worthwhile use of a computer is the writing
and playing of videogames”. A sentiment that was echoed
by Pitfall creator David Crane, with his idea that: “Man
will always use his most advanced technology to amuse himself.”
Fine sentiments, I’m sure you’ll
agree, but they don’t go far enough - gaming isn’t
a product of computing power, it’s the primary driving force
behind the advancement of computing. Not just personal computing,
but computing full stop. There has, quite simply, never been a
successful computer that didn’t play games. It is the games-playing
potential of our computers that forces us to upgrade. After all,
I could just as easily write this piece on a Tandy TRS-80. I don’t
need four gigahertz of processing power just to jot a few words
down, but I do if I want to play Doom 3.
Quad Damage.
Without videogames, without the spark that,
50 years ago, led a bunch of students at MIT to create Space War,
computers would still be big, Star Trek-like boxes full of flashing
lights – the infamous “five computers in the world.”
This is our time, boys and girls. This is our
future. We created it and we, the game-players, own it. Relish
that, love it and live for it. And if your children start playing
some shitty karting game on your PC, don’t strap them into
a portable coffin with no brakes and throw them down a hill –
march them down to Game and treat them to a copy of Soul Calibur
2 and yourself to an extra controller and spend the afternoon
in Combo Heaven. You know it makes sense.
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