I'm pretty empathetic to the authors feelings. Video games and I are about the same age. So I've seen these things since nearly their inception. I actually played pong on a Magnavox Odyessy, even though it came out about the time I was born. And I've watched it grow up, and in all seriousness I paid a good bit of attention to it. Not that I was really into games, quite the contrary. I hated the Atari 2600, I thought the graphics were awful and the fun pretty marginal. I had computers, an Apple IIe, a commodore 64, a Mac Classic. I vividly remember DOS and booting directly to basic. Horrible times. DOS couldn't catch my attention for any length of time. It was really only useful if you were using a database or a word processor, or some spreadsheet. The efforts made to make it into something engaging, in my opinion, failed miserably. The people that owned PCs running DOS were one of a few types. Either rich and bored, in search of a new distraction, business people who had to take their work home with them, or the children of said businesspeople. I was friends with a few of the children in question. And for a long time I couldn't understand peoples enthusiasm. I think their enthusiasm had more to do with upwardly minded parents urging their children to get in on the ground floor of an industry back in Reagan's eighties. Booting to basic was about as much fun as reading a textbook. And while it was somewhat interesting, what you could do was pretty limited, with or without extensive study. I needed much more out of it to take it seriously. That Apple IIe saw little use, and was eventually sold. I remember the commodore 64 saw some use. It actually had some graphics, it didn't have a gui, but it could render some simple stuff, and that helped out their games a lot. I remember trying to get interested in Zork, and it bored the hell out of me. I've always loved art, and I think I needed a little visual stimulation out of the thing to take it at all seriously. I am also a pretty visual learner. Colecovision and Intellivision held my attention for a while, but I didn't own one, and decided I didn't want to spend my (my parents) money on one. They had enough financial burdens at the time. I was also seeing the technology get better and more engaging and decided to wait for better things later. I think my efforts have paid me in a way. Though I am not truly a gamer, certainly not hardcore or oldschool, I was pretty detached from what I considered to be pretty much crap wrapped in advertising with promises attached. What do I get out of it now? Is this thing going to be upgradable? The answer to the latter question was invariably no. and I didn't care a whit about the crap. Or what at the time I considered crap.
I didn't need one, but when Apple released their Macintosh, with their gui operating system, I thought, this is a good solution. It simplifies things and really makes for a good computing experience. I got one eventually, a MAC classic. I got it used and there were much better things on the market at the time. But there was enough software for it to keep me happy. Games included. Plus I could write papers on it while in college. I wish I still had that computer.
I remember it took a while for Microsoft to release it's first gui after Apple had done so. I thought Microsoft would lose if it didn't make some changes, and eventually they did. But it was a horrible disaster for years, Ugly, really relying on DOS for it's structure, still mostly for use as a database, and the games weren't up to snuff. At least they didn't meet my standards. I remember hearing about Half-Life. How revolutionary it was. 3D graphics cards, and other exciting things. I looked, but really thought it needed a lot of polish still. Besides which, such things were prohibitively expensive for me. I didn't own a television at that time in my life, much less a computer. Hell, often enough I didn't have an apartment of my own.
The internet had sort of a cult status at that point and sounded pretty interesting. But I couldn't afford a computer, and I had plenty of other things to keep me interested. I remember the .com bubble burst, and saw people's enthusiasm flag, and the overboard attitude of the businesspeople became publicly noticable. I had had a sense, even when I was 12, that a lot of this was business. You could tell by the orientation of PCs in their earliest days. No wonder I had looked to Apple at first. But the big failure of the industry validated a suspicion that I'd had. That it was something other than fun, or a good thing for individuals at home. It was a business. And if you do even a little digging today you'll see that in a big way. But a lot of my friends lost jobs during that. Small startups closed. People moved. People who had once paid for my drinks without a thought were asking for places to stay. But the internet had some good things in it, most of which seemed to live.
About the time of Broadbands slightly broader adoption, and About the release of DirectX 8 I was more interested. I had some money, a stable lifestyle, a place to live. a pretty normal circumstance. I finally bought a windows based PC. I learned how to build, partially for my own edification, partially because it seemed fun, and perhaps a useful skill. So I got my PC, got wound up to play some video games. So here I am now, playing modern video games, never really having been a part of it, just sort of periphreally aware of it, but paying attention, pretty close attention. Now I love it. It has gotten past it's rudimentary roots and has finally become engaging in something of a broader way. And I really enjoy it.
What does this have to do with the article? It seems sort of tangential you say? Well really, the point is that while you could have taken an interest in this at the time, and become a gamer at it's roots, It was possible to take an interest from a distance, and not be so involved. I think the term gamer, particularly attached to the term hardcore (and to a lesser extent oldschool) is really too hip for reality. It's inflated, like the .com boom, the coolness of it is really overblown. You see it now with complaints about innovative gameplay and it being fun as opposed to simply graphically exciting or in some other techincal way improved upon. I think kids get sucked in when there isn't a lot there, they relate to the things older kids (some of us in our thirties, and even older to some extent) talk about and inflate this thing into...something it's not. Okay games are fun, or can be. And I'm all for kids being able to play games, and I think it's a good thing, just overblown. You can see it in the expense of things like HD television, the technical excellence of the Sony PS3. And if you follow along with the tech stuff related to computer building, you'll see really costly stuff, A lot of which I think is unneccesary unless you're making movies or games themselves, and some other things. But being a gamer today is nearly a bizarre fetish, powered by businesses more than anything, and fun, it just needs some temperance from the industry that creates it, and some rational thought by consumers.
There is a lot of associated thinking and other stuff I experienced that is left out, but I think I got to the meat of it here.
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