Ping
Back in the 1970s, a very novel machine suddenly appeared in motorway services. It had a screen and two knobs by which two short white lines could be made to travel vertically up and down the left and right edges of the screen. They were virtual bats that, provided the hands on the knobs were quick enough
, determined the course of a white blob that went back and forth across the screen. It was a simulation of tennis, and the first computer game accessible to the public. It could easily have been called Ping, had they not called it Pong.
Not very long after, the game became available to buy, in the form of a little box that could be connected to a TV set. What a thrill it was to be able to manipulate the image on your TV screen. Up until then, television sets could only offer passive entertainment, but now we could be in control. What a feeling of power that was. Of course, you needed to have children in order to justify buying the game, but they rarely got anywhere near it.
Things moved on quite quickly during the subsequent years, and computer games became very sophisticated. I couldn’t keep away from Tomb Raider for a few months, although the driving force behind that was not so much a need to get to the next level, but rather a determination to get Lara Croft to do something she was not designed to do. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, though; computer games were for kids.
How things have changed. I work with a man in his sixties, who quite unabashedly boasts about how many rampaging aliens he terminated on the previous night. There is a thriving market in adult computer games, and grownups are no longer ashamed or self-conscious about playing them. Of course, they don’t refer to it as playing games, they are “gaming”. A designation the industry came up with to turn childish play into a legitimate adult activity. A rose by any other name.