The last forty-five years of video gaming have given us everything from bouncing balls to vast universes utterly void yet full of exploration potential. And now gaming culture has begun to feast upon the fetid carcass of it's own dead past in a last pitiful attempt to find new worlds to explore, new experiences to surrender to, and, perhaps, a new way of looking at ‘games’ and those who choose to allocate precious time resource to the ‘playing’ of them.

Whether it is in the bizarrely long-running interest around retro gaming—the gaming equivalent of Japanese soldiers lost in the jungles of Borneo who insist that the second World War is still but an island away—or in the likes of Namco, Konami and Nintendo all pillaging their past and serving us long-cold dishes as sustenance new and impossibly exciting. And we, we the not-so-humble players, we the true prophets of the next generation revolutions, we, who revel in our stored-and-shared knowledge of videogaming’s past glories, we love them for it.

Take the recent emergence, birth if you will, of Made in Mario. On the surface, this ‘game’ is but a collection of barely realised skits, absent the depth of gameplay that we look for, nay demand, of a modern title. There is no plot to speak of and a silent majority of the games involve but the press of but a single button in an ultra pared down Bemani extravaganza. And yet, underneath this thin-esculent veneer of apparent simplicity lies the very heart and soul of all that is great about twenty-first century gaming.

Art is never only for art's sake; sometimes its for parody too.

The characters, like bit-players in a turn-of-the-century Russian novella, lead short, pointless lives, living only to provide a basis for the central themes of love, loss and digicourse that categorise the games themselves. These are the ultimate video game characters; extant solely to provide a respite from the purity of the gaming experience. One wonders how they feel about their short, futile, brutish existence, but only briefly as you are swept back into the game with only a brief “Write!” as your command. Perhaps they think nothing at all, perhaps they are too captivated by your performance. You strive, as we all must, to live up to their expectations, to fulfil the role as their very own god, if you fail; then they fail, your fates intimately and deliciously bound in the common quest for the high score.

And of course, by reducing the games themselves to their simplest core components, Nintendo have revealed to us the essential quantities, the e’sprit de gaming or, if you will, the ur-game that lies at the heart of every great gaming experience from Pong to Ik-ar-ug-a and beyond. When you have experienced the ecstasy of Jump Forever, played for thirty straight minutes or when the final epic micro confrontation has rescinded into distant memory, then, and only then, will you understand just exactly how much cleverer I am than you.

What the critics are saying about 'Fuck Penicillin' with Stevie Pond:

'Does he still live with his Mum?' - Cheryl Baker