Playing The Game.....Then and Now

Gaming.

When I were a lad, many years ago, the word didn't even exist.

You played games.  Cowboys and Indians was a favourite, since it was the time when John Wayne was the world's biggest movie star and every other film coming out of Hollywood was one of his westerns - classics like True Grit, or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or Chisum.....all films I would happily watch now to while away an hour or so.

We kids also played War a lot.  We were from that post-World War 2 generation whose parents had fought in that conflict, or been left at home minding the fires.  All the comics, at least in Britian, had names like the Victor and the Valiant, and featured yarns about heroic British Tommies like Captain Hurricane (and his trusty batman, Maggot Malone) winning the War single handedly.  I could relate to that one because my dad had been an officer's batman in the War.  And when The Duke wasn't winning the Wild West he was Winning the War, so those movies were must-sees as well: The Sands of Iwo-Jima, The Flying Leathernecks and so on.

There were stories about unfeasible football teams too, like the incomparable Legge's Eleven, wherein ex-England international Ted Legge took over a ramshackle Third Division team and guided them to the First Division championship and FA Cup with a team of misfits including winger Nipper Norton (discovered after poaching pigeons from Ted's house and running away ridiculously fast), goalkeeper Chubby Mann, overweight and so colour-blind the team had to wear zig-zag stripes so that he could distinguish them from the opposition, and a pair of French inside forwards who had previously been circus jugglers and were wont to perform in a match like they did in the ring.  It was way better than the more popular Roy of the Rovers, let me tell you, but hardly anyone remembers it.

If you read the Eagle, there was of course the brilliant Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, so of course we played at Space Explorers too.  This was before Apollo landed on the moon, almost before Gagarin's flight, so of course anything was possible for us in a way that it no longer seems to be.  TV shows like Supercar, Fireball XL5 and Thunderbirds, all from the genius of Gerry Anderson and Supermarrionation (they were all puppet shows) fed into that future vision and fuelled our own imaginations.

We went to games too.  The local football team, a village team, had people to watch their games on a scale that rarely seems to happen nowadays - in later years, when I played myself, we regularly had 30 or 40 people turn up (even if most of them were wives and girlfriends and mates of the players).  Not a lot, but it could get lively.  I remember one under 16's match when our left winger was getting a bit of a kicking from a bigger full back, and his mum finally lost her temper and ran onto the pitch and laid about the lad with her handbag.  We banned her after that - our bloke was absolutely mortified with embarrassment.  We got to the odd cup final too, and usually took at least one and sometimes 2 coaches plus cars.  Happy days.

Then there were board games.  Chess, of course, and draughts.  Monopoly.  Sorry.  Battleships.  All still popular today.  We played cards, either alone (Patience in its various guises) or in pairs (Snap!) and groups (Whist and Rummy).  Later on, at the cricket club, we had an after match card school that could feature a dozen players and go on until midnight.  We played three card brag, minimum bet a penny, maximum bet a pound, and there were some quite good winnings to be had.  I remember picking up thirty quid on one hand, and not a note in sight, just a pocket full of coins.

But the thing is, all these childhood games were either healthy, both physically and mentally, or skillful.  We spent most of our time out in the open air playing them, even if the weather was a bit wet and chilly, and I don't remember too many cases of pneumonia, just the odd cold.

Later on, in adolescence, we moved on to indoor games, that did not necessarily mean including girls.  I was playing darts for my local pub at 14, drinking pints of bitter and puking on the way home but enjoying every minute of it.  I was quite a useful player too.  There was also bar billiards, a surprisingly skillful game as you had pegs partially obscuring the highest scoring pockets and had to rack up a higher total score than your opponent against the clock, and if you knocked the pegs over you lost the score for that break or your entire score, depending on which peg.  Later on there was snooker and and billiards, on full size tables, and of course pool in the pub (I still preferred bar billiards though).  Snooker always caused me problems, as I suffer from a red-green colour blindness, so if the brown (I know.....) finds its way down into the pack of reds I have huge problems distinguishing it, especially from the far end of the table.  The number of points I've given away like that over the years.....  But I still love a frame, and one day would love to have a basement so that I can have my own table.

One year me and a couple of workmates entered the London Stock Exchange Snooker Championship, and we had to travel up to the City from our local office in Kent to play a match.  The venue was the Great Windmill Street Billiards and Snooker Club, in the heart of Soho in its heyday.  We spent an hour or two wandering around trying to find the place, trying to ignore the hookers and their pimps in shady doorways - we were young country boys, remember, not worldly-wise at all.  We eventually found it, sandwiched between two equally seedy strip joints, behind a plain black door and up a flight of dingy stairs.  We were roundly beaten, but got pissed anyway.  Happy days....



That kind of gaming, if you can call it that, I understand and can appreciate.  But today's gaming, electronic gaming, I just cannot fathom.

I remember the early editions of arcade games that used to be in pubs - not the one-armed bandits, but the more allegedly skillful ones.  I don't remember its name, but one I tried was played on a console about six feet high and half as deep, on a single small green screen, and involved operating one of two electronic paddles.....a bit like table tennis I guess, trying to get the "ball" (just a bloody great white dot) past the machine's or your opponent's paddle, using essentially the sides of the pitch to bounce your shots off at odd angles.  If you were ok at snooker or bar billiards you were generally ok at that because you had an appreciation of angles already. Incredibly primitive, but we spent hours playing it.  And getting raddled, of course.

Then came the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and the original Sony Playstation and Super Nintendo entertainment systems, and things moved on rapidly.  For a start, you could buy games to play on them.  They typically came on cassettes, like music did between the vinyl and CD eras (and before digital downloads were even imagined).  I can't remember which console we had, but there was a game that came with it called Fire Ant that my kids, especially Patrick, used to play a lot.  It was multi-level and basically (from memory) you had to find your way through a nest of ants without getting slaughtered by the things.  If you lost a life, you had to start all over.  I could never get the hang of the bloody thing, but Pat was able to navigate through the levels without really looking and carrying out a conversation with you while he did it.  He was about 6 I think.

There was Football Manager and a rival Championship Manager plus a whole raft of inferior copycat games endorsed by ageing pro's like Chris "Kammy" Kamara.  They all involved being the manager of your selected team, be it Real Madrid or Arsenal or something more prosaic like Truro City or Tonbridge, and by a process of buying and selling players (real ones and characters invented by the game's manufacturer that bore uncanny resemblance to real ones) build a squad and lead it to league, cup and European glory through simulated games against other "teams".  All very clever, and statistic heavy.  Doug and John (especially Doug) were demons at that, and played it for hours.  Leagues sprang up all over the place, and groups of mates would have their own competitions.  As a football nut I could appreciate the allure of those games, but could never figure out how you actually played them.

Improved technology meant improved games, and soon you were able to actually control the characters in your games, and lo and behold you had the FIFA (football) and NBA (basketball) franchised games, a new one every year that created monstrous profits for game and console makers alike, at the expense of exasperated parents who were coerced through peer pressure to ensure their kids always had the correct version.  I couldn't get the hang of them either.

 Of course not all games are sport based.  A lot of them are, shall we say, a little violent and bloodthirsty, and involve mass killings in one form or another - for instance Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed.  Or "encourage" crime like nicking cars and driving like a maniac through virtual cityscapes (Grand Theft Auto).  And movie or tv tie-ins, like Harry Potter and Game of Thrones.  All of them making huge profits etc etc......see FIFA and NBA above.  Operating them has become increasingly complex too - no-longer key strokes, but full on controllers with about a dozen buttons on them that can be operated singly or in pairs. Motion sensitive wands and floor pads, both linked to camera so you can join in too.

And pretty soon kids stopped playing the healthy and imaginative outdoor games of my childhood and youth, and devoted themselves to being parked in front of a flickering screen, sweating over a bunch of pixels darting around in front of their eyes, wrapped up in the roar of the crowd or the rattle of gun fire and explosions or the howl of abused and stolen V8 engines, oblivious to everything else including food and homework.  Is it coincidence that the increase of these passtimes mirrors the rise in childhood obesity? Probably not.



I have a second family now, as you know, and history is repeating itself.  In fact nowadays it's actually worse, courtesy of the internet explosion.  Because they are no longer dependent on a screen and console and CDs - although we have them too.

No, they have the additional attraction of the World Wide Web to play with.  There is in Poland a site (and I'm sure they exist in any country with an on-line presence) that is dedicated to games.  There are sections for all ages, from about 4 years old, with games tailored for each age group.  Some of them are good and educational, but most are just nonsense fun.  Then there are the more adult oriented sites like World of Tanks and World of Warplanes, where like-minded adolescent males can form a community and a team and blow the hell out of each other in the comfort of their own (probably darkened) bedrooms.

And mobile phones.  Any smartphone worth its salt has Angry Birds or something similar as a default, just like e-mail and address books and MP3 capability, with its own on-screen icon pre-installed.   And of course the iStore or Google Play and the other stores all have a vast collection of downloads, some free and some ridiculously expensive, to add to your collection.  A lot of them are free but have paid extras - all of which add to your phone bill, as do the additional costs of being on-line all the time (terrifyingly high if you're roaming).   My kids have about four games on Ania's phone that they play, and invariably there are fights over whose turn it is to have the phone, or who has been on it longest......

And social media, finally, adds to it.  Would Farmville and its on-line brethren have existed or got anywhere (and in so doing made obscene profits for a relatively few people) without Facebook?    For that matter, would Facebook have become the behemoth it patently is without offering Farmville and so on as an integral part of its infrastructure?  Wall Street is to blame too - how it can value a company that is basically a One Trick Pony (the makers of Candy Crush Saga) at tens of billions of dollars when it went public (thus lining a few more pockets, not all of them bankers') is beyond me, I'm afraid.

So these days, I seem to spend half of my evenings yelling at my kids to "put mummy's phone down now!" instead of enjoying Top Gear on BBC Knowledge.



Now I'm probably a bit of dinosaur, but I have no doubt in my mind that the rise of electronic entertainments - gaming, if you prefer - is having a derogatory effect on the average kid, and hence on society as a whole (since those kids ultimately grow up).   In a few cases, perhaps, the gamers are moved to try a bit of coding or IT themselves, and, who knows, may turn into the next Gates or Zuckerberg or Schmidt.  But for every Gates or Zuckerberg or Schmidt there are probably millions of Kevin The Teenagers, whose schooling is wasted and homework ignored because of the addiction to darkened rooms and Warcraft on SuperNES, unemployed and unemployable, overweight and underwashed.  I find that very sad.

That's not to say in my day things were perfect.  I can think of many kids who neglected their schoolwork in favour of reading The Beano or kicking a ball about or bird's nesting or whatever, and ended up wasting their talents as gravediggers or labourers, or (yes) unemployed and unemployable.

Of course, it's up to us parents to make sure that doesn't happen.  It's not down to teachers, it's parents who must be accountable and accept the responsibility of ensuring our kids have the right priorities.  I'm grateful that my mum and dad insisted on my doing my homework before allowing me to watch the telly or go out to play football or whatever, even though at the time I was incredibly resentful about it.   I was never the best or brightest student at school, but my war veteran dad insisted that I did my best, even at the things I didn't like and was basically crap at, and now at 61 I'm a stubborn old git who has tried (and is still trying) to instill that never-say-die-anything-is-possible ethos into my own kids.

And it doesn't get any easier......