BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a friendly reminder to get on over to my big reading and who-knows-what, 6 p.m. tonight at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. (And apologies to those who couldn’t connect to the site earlier this morning; it’s all fixed now.) But for now…
TECHNO-PROGRESS, some Net-lovers aver, is supposed to make everything continually obsolete every year and a half or so (“Moore’s Law”).
Marry that to the “planned obsolescence” concepts that have ruled consumer-product industries since the ’50s, and you end up at the landfill where thousands of 1983-vintage Atari game cartridges are supposed to be buried, unsalable at the time (though revered classics now).
But if video games rapidly go out of mode, how about video-game books?
Ms. J.C. Herz published Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds way back in the Neandrethal days of 1997. Ah, that was such a simpler time: There were still five Spice Girls. Streaming video was a mere twinkle in Rob Glaser’s eye. Cable modems and DSL lines were far less available than hype articles about them. Some pundits were proclaiming such venerable hi-tech names as Apple and Nintendo to be irrepairably doomed. And on the video game charts in the U.S., nothing was hotter than the ultraviolent, hyperrealistic “first-person shooters” and other fighting games.
Herz spends an awful lot of space in her short book defending and even praising the likes of Doom, Marathon, and Mortal Kombat. She really loves them when she sees boy players acting out their genocidal fantasies thru the guise of a dominatrix-babe game character (though she doesn’t mention what would become the queen of the digitized doms, Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft).
From the tone of the book as a whole, it’s clear she came into the project hoping to put a positive spin on the whole gaming culture. It’s a semi-cruel twist-O-fate that, by structuring her book chronologically and ending it at that time, she was stuck with depicting as gaming’s latest Ultimate Achievement a point when the industry was at its slickest and stupidest.
Since then, things have changed somewhat. The gross-out violence games are still around, but their novelty has definitely worn off and developers are trying to add new dimensions to their play (such as in the more recent Tomb Raider sequels). Higher-speed Net connections have caused a boom in real-time, multi-player gaming.
And Nintento’s come roaring back with the N64 system. In turn, that’s meant a resurgence in Nintendo’s game-biz aesthetic (preferring fun and cuteness over blood and guts; emphasizing kids rather than teens or teens-in-young-adult-bodies). The keystone of this resurgence is Pokemon, which not only emphasizes characters and game-play over rendering and spectacle, but was originally released on the comparatively-primitive Game Boy platform!
I do like the first half or so of Herz’s book. She reverently looks back at the early days of Pong and Asteroids, and explains just why aging blank-generation kids look back so fondly at those relatively lo-tech games with their abstract blips and sprites moving to cheesy synth music.
And you gotta love any book with the nerve to describe one avid collector of these old games, who also has a “normal” day job as a corporate lawyer, as “a human Frosted Mini-Wheat.”
IF YOU’RE ALREADY scheduled to attend some $100 dinner-theater show tonight, there’s another live event promoting The Big Book of MISC. It’s next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.
TOMORROW: Some more aphorisms and words to live by.
ELSEWHERE: A first-person site all about teenage troo luuv. You wanna tell her it might not work out the way she dreams? (“He is going to be an Orthopedic Surgeon and I will be a Professional Singer.”) I sure don’t wanna tell her…
