On the day after Christmas, my brother Dan and I braved a wintry Kansas day in search of three controllers and a game for the Wii that I had been given for my birthday just three days earlier.
Our first stop: the neighborhood Target, where we see dozens of the distinctive red case that holds New Super Mario Brothers, but, alas, no controllers. We assume that we’ll have the chance to buy the game anywhere and leave it in the rack. We move on to the Wal-Mart in my area, a place I go only under the most dire of circumstances, and only when my mood is bubbly enough to counter the immediate depression that comes with witnessing a pair of malnourished children dangle from a shopping cart while their mother debates whether she should spend the money she earned at her job as a “Sandwich Artist” on TV dinners or TV shows.
Wal-Mart has neither the game nor the controllers, a fact that my brother radios to me as I stand in line at a nearby GameStop, where a Buy 2 Used Games, Get 1 Used Game Free special has families lined up 13 deep to buy the not-so-latest Grand Theft Auto, camped out like GameStop is a soup kitchen and the stock market has just crashed
GameStop has controllers, but no game. I buy three of the former.
Dan and I leap back into the car, now aware that Target’s hold on the market for New Super Mario Brothers was likely a fleeting one. We race back to the red behemoth and Dan drops me at the door. I speed-walk past a man who I irrationally assume is going to beat me to the last copy. I rush around the corner of the electronics desk … and find the game. I am jubilant.
Dan and I rush home, where we unpack the game and the controllers, summon our brother Matt, and dive into a made up world of moving mushrooms and woefully inept turtles.
And it is good.
On the birthday for which I was given the machine that would cause 1/3 of my family to race around a suburbanly sprawling section of Kansas City in search of accessories for that machine, I turned 32.
I state my age not because I want to drive home a point about the hold video games have on my life at age 32. Video games have almost no hold on my life – they exist only in the periphery. I play them only when my brothers are home, or when I can convince a friend to join me in a Guitar Hero bout.
I state my age to make the case that the behavior displayed by my brother Dan and I is actually fairly standard for a 32-year-old in late 2009. And, further, to note how very bizarre that is, at least when compared to 32-year-olds of recent history.
When my father was 32, he was busy getting married and, well, I guess I don’t know much about what else my father was doing at 32, other than that he was living in California and that he and my mother were going camping a lot. (At least, there are a bunch of pictures of them going camping.) But, based on my knowledge of my father’s personality, it is safe to say that he would now think me insane if he knew I was spending any part of the day after Christmas pursuing hand/eye entertainment.
However, when I’m his age, I will find it perfectly normal if my reasonably intelligent, mostly well-rounded son takes three hours to search out the means for his brothers and he to spend part of a day controlling pixellated Italians as they search for a mythical princess on a television screen.
Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know. (My gut reaction: bad. But I’ll save my commentary on the possible ills of video games for another day.) I only know that video games have become the norm. And that they’ll probably stay the norm for a long time.
The more interesting question – and one I pondered long and hard while in the Game Stop watching a teenager in front of me call home to ask permission to buy a used memory card for his PS2 – is this: What have video games replaced? What was my father doing in 1974 that I am not doing now? Was he sleeping more? Drinking more? Playing more pool? Poker?
Granted, at 32, my father was newly-married, and I am not. But some of my most video game-mad friends are married. I don’t think my father was reading more than I do now. And it doesn’t seem – from my knowledge of the situation – that he and my mother were doing more carousing than I.
Was there a cosmic shift that no one told me about, and there are now more hours in the day? Were my parents active in the community, doing charity work and hosting church dinners?
Did my father simply do less than I do now?
Of similar interest is the question of the poor folk at Game Stop. “Poor” because they don’t have very much money. But also “poor” in the sense of naïve and unsuspecting. The similarities between those people and patrons in a (choose from:) liquor store, casino, or line at the gas station Lotto machine, were overwhelming. The same dull look. The same scrounge for cash.
But cash all the same. That money is coming from somewhere. And it’s not limitless. Meaning that, if it is being spent on video games, it isn’t being spent on something else. What is it replacing? Food? Booze? Trips to the movies?
I’m not sure I can answer those questions, at least not with any certainty. What I can do is come to a decidedly depressing conclusion that answers all of the questions I’ve raised.
Are you ready? Because it isn’t very nice. It is this:
Life was better before.
Because what are video games, if not the closest we’ve come to a substitution for real life? People play video games to keep from thinking about their lives. And they come up with the money to do so however they can. Kind of like drug addicts.
The above is not an indictment of video games as a form of entertainment. Several nights ago, after Dan had left town, Matt and I joined our friend Jens for a communal rush through several levels of the Mario Brothers game for which I had looked with such persistence. We talked, we laughed, we poked fun of one another. Anything more social and we’d have been involved in a mega-wrong way threesome.
Video games are not the problem. Life is the problem. Or rather, life today is the problem. I’m afraid that people are less happy now than they were 30 years ago. And, video games – like television, cocaine, and soma – are feeble attempts to allieviate that unhappiness.
Our only salvation is not the obvious one. It is not to give up video games. Because that ain’t happening – the New Super Mario Brothers is simply too fun.
There’s moderation as a solution, of course. But I don’t know that I’m going to convince anyone who was at the Roeland Park GameStop to moderate his video game intake. As with recycling, personal fitness and dampening one’s intake of pornography, the only solution I can see is an individual one. I can only worry about myself and how I deal with the impact of video games on my own life.
With that in mind, I make the following prayer:
Dear Gods of Electronic Fun,
I hope that, if I make it to my father’s age, and if I have a son who lives to be 32, I will be able to laugh about the ridiculous things we do in pursuit of our own entertainment.
But I hope that, when we’re doing that laughing, we’re on a camping trip.
(With a generator, a TV, and a Nintendo Wii9, so we can play Tecmo Super-Mega-Footballsport.)
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Interesting thoughts. I’d take it a step further and argue that while I don’t think video games, per se, are evil and amount to life being worse today, I do think technology is causing us to literally be poorer now. Your point about “what did they spend their money on before” resonates with me and gets me to thinking about how much money I’d save if I didn’t “have” to buy a new cell phone every two years, new laptop every five (BTW, I totally agree with your five year lifespan on laptops!!), updated TV technology, universal remotes, antivirus protection, etc. etc. I think this relative need to keep up with technology will really affect how our generation lives it’s respective lives in forty or fifty years via how much money they’ve socked away for retirement time.
Anyway, got me to thinking and was motivated to post a response. I enjoy the writing all the way back to your NBA.com and ESPN.com blogs. In fact, I just passed your book along to a buddy I used to hoop with at Illinois…sorry, I imagine I just cost you a residual check by doing that. Assuming he likes it, it’ll up your website traffic though. :)
You make a good point. It really has gotten disgusting. And, often, they’re monthly charges – cellular, internet, satellite – which are vaguely insidious in the way they add up over the long haul.
Thanks for the comment. I’m okay w/ borrowed books. Most of the time.
Yeah, seriously, cable/net/cell are about $300/month. That’s $3600/year right there in non-inflation-adjusted dollars that my Mom never had to spend in her 20s and 30s. OK, my brain hurts now.
Oh, and I did buy your book new at least. I bought Mike Greenberg’s book on Amazon for like 30 cents…that’s just a total insult…like picking it up in a garage sale.
We just got a Wii as well and I can’t stop thinking about Mario Kart. Even when I’m off doing other enjoyable things, she’s always on my mind.
People can live without cell phones or computers if they really wanted. I read one of Peter King’s mmqb columns where he says people in the northwest aren’t tied down to their technology and actually spend time outdoors. Its a choice. if you feel you need these things then you will pay for them. I know a few people who have held out on getting cell phones because do we really need to be connected all the time. Thats where we get a lot of stress…especially in the work place…being available 24×7 damages our personal space.
I don’t have a video game system because I know it would eat up a lot free time that i spend reading, playing sports or something else. Once again its a choice but i think video games are addictive and generally mindless.
I too found myself entrenched in a Wii battle with my 8 year old cousin during the holidays…I’m grateful that kids are still playing the ‘simple games’…part of my understanding of worlds, narrative, and even literacy was through playing videogames…the games were so basic that I found myself creating entire narratives as I played; almost like bizarro realtime fan-fiction. I’d write into Nintendo or Nintendo Power at least once or twice a month giving them suggestions for videogames. That being said, at some point the games got too involved/cinematic and I got too old and as a result I started using the videogames to escape terrible jobs or (god-forbid) boredom.
I would also argue that technology in general is not only making us poorer. It’s making us dumber. I can’t remember the last time I had to memorize a phone number. We don’t have to know a word’s spelling, or check it up in the dictionary, the basic text editor underlines it in red when it’s wrong anyway. We learn guitar hero instead of guitar. We play Wii tennis instead of tennis. We use solar powered pocket calculators instead of brain power. Our mainstream artists have replaced saxophone or piano with synthesizers and softwares. Penmanship has turned into “Arial black, size 12” or “Copperplate, Bold”.
You could argue we’re exposed to more information, have developed skills older generations will never truly hone. But there’s been a trade off, as well as a strong conviction that the trade off is good. I’m not entirely sold on the idea. But maybe it answers the question “what were my parents doing 30 years ago”. Well, some of it anyway.
Anyway, your article made me think about stuff. Thanks.
Mick – I had the same problem w/ the original Mario Bros. Of course, I was 10 then, but whatever.
Clarence – Of course they can. But we don’t.. As for personal space…yeah, I’m working on carving that out again.
Brian – Agreed about cinematic video games. Which, actually, is the beauty of the Wii and the Guitar Heros, I think. They’re so simplistic that they call back to River Raid and Tecmo Super Bowl – they’re representations of the real thing, without trying to BE the real thing.
Annick – Time to found a utopian society?
I was absolutely obsessed with the original Mario. I made my brother download it on our Wii. He’s way too young to fully appreciate it, but I make him play, just so I can beat him at one video game. That has nothing to do with this, but yeah…Memories.
One thing you missed out on, that Clarence picked up, was the idea of choice, regardless of the era. Just because the alternate choice at the time to camping was “XXX from 1970”, this does not mean it would automatically be chosen just as “videogame 2010” is not automatically chosen now. Does your Dad choose to play video games now that they are available to him, or does he still choose to go camping
Nice work Paul. Super Mario Bros Wii is awesome….just finished playing a couple levels myself.
How we choose to entertain ourselves has clearly changed as a result of technology, and the amount of money spent (at least for me personally) is sickening. However, as was mentioned above, it’s all a choice. Could I choose to spend my $$ elsewhere, or save for retirement? Absolutely! Will I later regret not doing it? Possibly. (Sorry for asking and answering my own questions…I hate when people do that) Maybe I should re-evaluate, but for now that’s the choice I’ve made.
Thanks again, keep up the good work!
Has anyone on here been camping lately? I took the family, and it sucks. It was great when I was a kid, but dad did all the work then. Now you get all the wood. Clean up the site at the end of the night. You have to chase away the critter in your food in the middle of the night, and scared as hell while doing it. Putting up tents is rocket science. And packing for the trip involved almost renting a freaking u-haul.
Remember life was cheaper, and mom didn’t work back then. Also we used phone books and the white pages to prank call someone. Remember buying stamps? That was a major pain in the ass. Grandma almost had a heart-a-stroke when they went from 18 cents to 21. And what about when your sister stayed on the phone for hours, not answering the call waiting, knowing you were waiting for that hot chick in seventh grade to call?
Getting my son the Xbox for Christmas was awesome for both of us. Having the Wii gives us options on our family gaming. Daughter likes the Wii, son the Xbox. We are an active family, but enjoy playing these in our down time. I work at a firehouse in an inner city neighborhood, and believe me big screens and gaming consoles are the norm in most of these households. How? No clue. They are as much a part of our culture as fishing and camping was back when dad grew up.
LHenry- Glad to have you reading. And you can answer your own questions any time you want.
Eric – You’re right – camping is kinda terrible. No way I’d take kids and not have a prescription for Ritalin for everyone.
Kudos to Eric. Camping is awful. Especially when you have to do the planning/worrying.
As a counterpoint to the ‘technology is bad’ point: technology is also making everything a lot more efficient. Which means one could conceivably use that technology to learn more in a shorter period of time. Or he could use it to play video games.
When do we start?
Matt – I would submit that efficiency does not always lead to happiness. Sure, we can find the restaurant with an iPhone, but the bonding experience of being lost isn’t without its charm.
Annick – March 12th?
Here’s an example of technology increasing efficiency. Seoul: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916302,00.html/. Sounds great, but I can’t help but think… what’s the point, exactly, of all this efficiency?
Paul. I have an appointment with the orthodontist then. How about May 20th?
Annick – cool article. seems to me the point in the tech efficiency boom is to make everything less expensive, less time-consuming (in traffic for example), less corrupt and more energy efficient. sounds amazing to me…
Moderation is key – be it video games or other activities.
As a resident of the aforementioned Pacific Northwest — noted above as where people aren’t tied down to their technology and actually spend time outdoors — I can tell you, it goes too far the other way here sometimes. To the point of addiction and the line being blurred to almost non-existent between work or casual wear and hiking/camping/fishing/cycling wear.
I’d rather play a few songs on Guitar Hero, head down to the coffee shop for a real in-person conversation with someone, and head out for a hike. But camping does suck.
Moderation is key, whether it is video games or other activities, in my opinion.
As a resident of the aforementioned northwest — mentioned above as being a place where people aren’t tied down to their technology and actually spend time outdoors — I can say the addiction goes the other way. To the point of the line being blurred to almost non-existent between work and casual wear and hiking/fishing/camping/cycling wear.
I’d rather play a few songs on Guitar Hero, head down to the coffee shop for a real in-person conversation with someone, and head out for a hike — all in moderation. That seems a little more healthy. But camping does suck.
Matt – You’re right, technology has great advantages. Like IBM says in its advertisements; “the world is ready for a smarter planet”. Less waste, smart power grids, better medicine, fewer fuckups with intelligence (someday?)… great. My point is that we need to be careful about our obsession with efficiency.
We spend a lot of time waiting, Niles mentioned. So maybe technology means less time waiting, less need for patience, goals more quickly achieved, shorter attention spans. More time for video games? We have goods at a cheaper price, but with cheaper value. Paul mentioned soma… which reminds me that hypnopaedics are more efficient at raising children than parents. Podsnap processes are cheaper/more efficient than pregnancy. Moving away from Huxley.. Robot cashiers are cheaper/more efficient than a lazy cashier. But having a machine tell me “thank you, we hope you come back to Supermarket X soon”…. Woof. It seems like everyone’s job is soon going to consist in staring at a computer screen. And that’s when their jobs aren’t replaced entirely. It’s robotization of processes, and as in Seoul, of life. Not sure I’m all for it. Like Paul, I think that maybe life was better 30 years ago.
Part of me thinks that the slow movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Movement) is not that stupid/hippie bullshit after all. The other part, of course, says that this is naive, oversimplified academic rhetoric, and that I need to get out of school, get a life, and a job.
Finally, sorry for the novel. Probably need to get away from my computer, or something.
Please indulge me for a moment while I nerd out and say that despite all that we spend on technology and other feckless pursuits, we are not poorer. Thanks to economic growth (via labor productivity/technology and capital investment), we’re actually much richer and thus, have more to spend. Specifically, in constant dollars, real GDP per person has tripled over the last 50 years or so.
What does that mean? Whereas today, the average American has $36k per year, in 1960 the average American was surviving on about $12k per year. And again, those are constant dollars – no inflation involved. So if you only had $12k per year, you would probably live much more like someone in 1960. No cable, cell phone, or video games. No computer. No mp3′s or iPods. Small living space with about the only things using electricity being a few lamps, a radio, and maybe a small black and white TV.
Now if anyone is still reading after all that tripe and can answer these questions, I’ve been dying to know – a) is the music in the new Super Mario Bros as awesome as in the original?, b) does the game at any point express it’s apologies and then proceed to inform you that your princess is in another castle?, and c) how awesome would the kid from “The Wizard” (not Fred Savage or the girl from Rilo Kiley) be at this game?
Hello to all you hypocrites that are using technology while you bag on it. I totally agree that one must have balance in one’s life. I love to be outdoors. I like nature and exercise. It’s 10 friggin degrees and dark at 5 and I’m at home using technology to exercise my brain and connect with other humans by reading this intelligent discourse. I’ve met some of you in real life, and others not, so the depth of human connection that is facilitated by today’s technology varies, but life and technology is what you make of it. Video games are only more of an escape from your life than books because of the interaction – the nature of affecting the game. Books and other healthy things can be avoiding “real” life as well. Books can be awe-inspiring or crap. Video games can teach you lessons, like – if you keep trying, you’ll probably figure it out and beat the level, or Crap – like if you murder a bunch of drug dealers you’ll be rewarded.