A coming of age

Lately my brother Peter (he’s five) has been asking me if I would teach him how to “play Mario”, so yesterday I dug my NES out of my closet and hooked it up to the TV. This is a major no-no, as I have a projection TV, but the old warnings only apply to old TVs, right? Right?

So anyways, after giving him a choice between Super Mario Bros. and Megaman 6, he opted for Megaman. In hindsight, this was pretty stupid, as somebody who is just cutting their teeth on gaming probably shouldn’t be starting with a franchise famous for inducing controlle-through-screen syndrome in all but the hardest core of players. He plunked down on my lap and proceeded to start mashing buttons with all the vigor and futility of a one-eyed bird going at a skyscraper window.  So I tried to give him a little instruction in basic controller usage techniques. Hold it with one hand at each side, use your thumbs, no DON’T move one hand to the other side, there that’s better, DON’T move your hands, etc.

And it suddenly struck me that this was, in some strange, surreal way, a coming of age ceremony. In much the same way that boys have been being taught to fish, to hunt, to tie a tie by their fathers and brothers for generations, this generation has one more feather in its developmental cap: the videogame. Watching his little hands frantically push the buttons, largely without any useful effect, I realized that everything I have been doing instinctively since my grandfather first bought me this NES, are lost on him. I push ‘A’ to select something without even thinking about it, he has to look at the controller every time he wants to jump just to see where ‘A’ is. It was mesmerizing to watch the gears in his head turning, trying to absorb everything at once and sort it out enough to jump over the next pit, to molecularize the next evil robot, to survive just one encounter without being beaten into a pulpy, wired robotic waste heap.

And how different it is from when I was his age. The earliest games that I can remember playing were on my father’s Commodore64, when I was roughly Peter’s age. Duck’s Ahoy and Ghostbusters were the order of the day, and looking back I realize that I did surprisingly well at them for my age. And unlike Peter, there was nobody to show me how. Sure, my Dad enjoyed playing games, but his instruction was very different. Video games were still so young a concept, so fresh an idea, that regardless of age, if you played, you were a beginner. There wasn’t a person alive who could look at me and state with any kind of integrity that “when I was your age…”. There simply weren’t any games around when the adults of the 80’s were kids, aside from perhaps very crude implementations of Pong and their ilk. And so largely, my generation taught itself.

And the games grew with us. From the NES and the Super Nintendo, to the Playstation and PS2, my generation can truly look back and say “we were there”.  And as the games have become technically more complex and engaging, so have the the barriers to entry. I think this is one of the major reasons that the Wii is cleaning house so effectively at the moment with its focus on intuitive controls and “accessible” games. The clock has been reset, a new generation of young people, the future gamers, are coming up in the wings, and there is no way they will be able to understand the Devil May Cry’s or new Final Fantasy’s of the world. They are simply too complex. It would be like trying to teach a kid to read by giving them a copy of Beowulf. It’s just not gonna happen. But, the current generation doesn’t need to teach themselves like mine did. Like so many other things, I think that most young boys (and some girls too, my sister is a total gamer) will now learn to play games not through experimentation, but through instruction. When kids start showing an interest in playing games “like mommy and daddy”, their parents will give them a controller and a sippy cup and plunk them down on the couch, and then teach them how to play. I learned how to run and jump the hard way. My brother will learn to run and jump because I will show him how. It’s social now.