Whenever I read wistful, Vinyl-Café-style pieces on youth, it’s hard not to feel that, in North America, being a kid once meant being outside a lot. Had my childhood been like those in the minds of magazine columnists, I imagine the memories of my youth would also involve staring at clouds while chewing on a blade of grass or, to be a bit more Canadian, playing hockey, rosy-cheeked in the streets. But if you ask me what I remember most about my brief childhood in Toronto, it would be sitting in my friend Arjun’s basement on hot summer days, the two of us planted in front of his Nintendo Entertainment System.
I realise that to many, my happy memories just sound like the beginnings of the childhood obesity problem. But to me there has always been something charming about getting misty-eyed over the video games of one’s youth. There is, after all, something about the fond look back at technology that rejects a kind of romanticised, pastoral view of our past. When a writer affectionately thinks about the games and gadgets of his or her youth, I love the strangeness of that ‘nostalgia for the new’, of the unabashed celebration of that which once was, and is often still, dismissed as impure, corrupting, and unnatural. It was there then too.
I suppose it’s true that in those hours spent playing games I could have been outside, riding my bike, eating ice cream and smelling freshly-mown grass. But funnily, it’s exactly the sensuous things I remember about my first forays into gaming: the blips and bleeps of early sound processors; the colours in Super Mario Bros. 3; and the curiously fascinating look of the square pixels that made up these worlds of fancy. So important are these recollections to me that, if you play a particular song from Sonic the Hedgehog, I might actually tear up as I remember how long it’s been and just how much my life has changed. Were I to write a column waxing romantic about the innocence and purity my youth, part of it would probably be about the Sega Genesis.
So often, when we speak of childhood and modern technology, we talk of all the things lost. And I when I think back to those yawning stretches of summer spent indoors, it does make me ache with remorse. If I had just read a bit more, if I had gone out a bit more often, if I had made more of an effort with girls… I guess something was lost. But because something was lost, it doesn’t mean that nothing was gained.
Those times spent tinkering with obscure bits of early operating systems and hardware taught me the little I know about computers today. What’s more, it was gaming that developed my comfort with technology, this ease with newness and change that so many in my time have acquired. I’m not and never have been afraid of technology. And while I’m still wary about its potential for dehumanisation, being a ‘gamer’ means I’ve always tended to look on the bright side of tech.
But while my immersion in the past of today’s technology prepared me for its future, there was something more at work in those pixellated worlds. Though I was an avid reader by the time I was four and a fan of TV only shortly after, it was games that first truly opened my imagination and my affinity for narrative, games that made me comfortable with the speed and kaleidoscope of the new and its language. Perhaps it was those ill-formed, still-shapeless electronic worlds that prepared me for the sparseness of Kafka’s prose. Maybe it was those later, more advanced games that readied me for Rushdie’s rapid-fire bark, for Deleuze’s fractured visions, for Chaudhuri’s languorous, disconnected fragments.
To play, to invent, to project ourselves onto screens and new places and identities - this is what gaming did to me. All these things are now bound up in the swirl of the postmodern, embodied by the web and, at least in my life, it was video games that prepared me for them. And while so frequently games are seen as that dark force that corrupted childhood, that robbed kids of the joy of outdoor play and exercise and reading and imagination, my experience – itself not very unique – means that we might need to rethink that.
I’m sure there must have been a time when writing, that mystical set of markings that can connote meaning – when its author isn’t even there to speak – must have at one point also seemed inorganic and unnatural. Books are a technology like any other and someone, somewhere must have once thought the musty smell of a paperback was off-putting and chemical when compared to the manuscript, the manuscript evil and satanic when compared to speech that came from the mouth. The cycle is always the same: for very good reasons we resist new technology and its cultural forms; then, when we’ve picked out the good from the bad, we embrace it and it becomes a part of us and the way we think and live. A similar thing is happening with video games.
I’m now in my thirties. When my friend Arjun comes home to visit from Washington, our talks usually start the same way: he tells me how things are at his job with the World Bank and I tell him how my PhD is going. Eventually though, maybe a little sheepishly, we slip into conversations about the video games of our youth. Conjuring reminiscences of those colourful screens and staccato beeps, we remember what it was like to sit in that cool basement for hours on end, discovering things, challenging ourselves and having fun. And slowly, as we chat, the happy memories in our heads burst, bit-by-bit, into pixels.
This post was inspired by long-time friend of Scrawled in Wax, The Quixotic Engineer, who recently wrote a post called “Gaming Made Me“, itself inspired by a series at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Note: the image in this post comes from the amazing Orioro at deviantArt.
