[2022-11-18] Video games
Back in the early '80s, my brothers had a two-person handheld video game: Coleco's Head to Head Football, released in 1979. I can't recall ever playing it. With four brothers at home, I likely had limited opportunity to get in on the action.
My next serious exposure to video games came a decade later when Chris moved in with me, bringing his NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). I still didn't understand the appeal of video games, like someone who doesn't comprehend others' obsession with sweets because they've never tasted sugar. Chris gave me the easiest game to play: Arkanoid. Developed in 1986, this classic brick-breaking game required players to move a paddle back and forth across the bottom of the screen to deflect a ball into the bricks above. The aim was to break the brick wall above while preventing the ricocheting ball from falling below the paddle and out of play. The game was sold with a specially designed controller, which had a knob that you could turn left or right. What could be more simple?
One Saturday morning, in the winter of 1990-91, I decided to give Arkanoid a try while Chris was at work. It didn't take long before I was hooked. I played that game for eight hours straight. When Chris returned home, he found me in a cold, dark house, lit only by the TV screen. I was fixated on the game. (If you ever played Arkanoid, this video will take you back to the sights and sounds of the game.)
My son was born soon after, so I had little time for video games. However, when Shane was about a year old, I discovered that there was nothing quite like a video game to keep him calm and content. I would sit in front of the TV with little Shane in a tiny car seat beside me, enraptured. I graduated from Arkanoid to Tetris, a game that required players to arrange differently shaped pieces in order to clear rows of blocks. This was an entertaining choice for me, but there was one problem. If I got a high enough score, an animated rocket would appear on the screen and take off. The swoosh of the rocket's blastoff frightened Shane. His little bottom lip would stick out, then start to quiver, before he would burst into tears. It was even worse when I achieved a particularly high score, which would launch an animated Saint Basil's Cathedral (homage to the creator's home country of Russia).
So I moved on from Tetris to Super Mario Bros. As they used to say of Johnson's baby shampoo, no more tears. There was nothing that Shane didn't like about this game. The bright colours, jaunty music and sudden disappearances and reappearances of Mario kept us both entertained. By the time I started playing Super Mario Bros. 2, I was determined to finish every level, which I did, eventually.
Shane would eventually become an accomplished video game player in his own right. We progressed to PlayStation and multiplayer games. My favourite was the maniacal Crash Team Racing, a cart-racing game that was fast and exhilarating. When Chris went off to visit his family in Saguenay, Quebec, the Christmas we got the game, the kids and I settled in for a few days of non-stop play. We pulled the couch in front of the TV, ate trashy food and played our hearts out. At one point, I started feeling ill, chalking it up to the sweet butterscotch marshmallow squares I had been eating. Then it dawned on me that I was getting motion sickness from the racing game.
Shane and I set our sights on completing every level in Crash Team Racing, but one particularly challenging level eluded us. One night, after the kids had gone to bed and I was playing by myself, I beat the previously unbeatable level. I was so excited that I went up to Shane's room to tell him that I had succeeded on the toughest course, gently shaking his shoulders while I whispered excitedly. At that moment, I was way more hyped about it than he was.
As the years passed and I got more and more busy with work and life, I played video games less and less—returning to them on occasion to take my mind off something upsetting (especially Jewels Star Blast, a classic match-three game).
The exception was Pokémon Go, which Chris and I got into after Shane jumped on board first. It was more than a game. It was an incentive to walk (to hatch eggs more quickly), to visit places we might not otherwise have gone (to find elusive Pokémon) and to do something as a family (we spent many hours together at Dick Bell Park, where rare characters would spawn with uncharacteristic frequency). It was amazing to see grandparents and grandchildren playing the game, youth and middle aged people swapping stories, and Pokémon Go players of all sorts communing happily together.
These days, the fun I previously had with video games has been replaced by the gamification in Duolingo, the app I'm using to learn Portuguese. Gamification is a process of adopting elements of gaming—such as points, gems, leader boards, and competition—to incentivize users to continue making progress. It gives me the best of both worlds: a worthwhile quest that feels like a game.
More than entertainment, video games were often a way to connect with loved ones on a shared quest.
