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Atari Blues
by Jonathan Penton

To the archived articlesLet's talk about video games.

I realize, dear readers, that you do not come to my literary journal to read about video games. But I am the author, you are the audience, and I outrank you.

Video games have been on my mind a lot lately. My son was in town for the Christmas holidays, and, in accordance with his wishes, this trip was less eventful than his last. He wanted to spend less times at theme parks and museums, and more time sitting around the house with his dad. I ask you, what parent could not love an attitude like that? That is, before I realized that sitting around the house with my son would mostly involve hour after hour after day of video and computer games.

My son has a Nintendo Gamecube. That, I'm given to understand, is one of the newer game systems available for people who find it fun to chase pixels around their television sets. He and his mother traded in their old game system, a PlayStation 2, which is a slightly older such toy, for this newer model. I didn't know you could do that; I was very impressed by the idea. My brother, a teenager 12 years my junior, did the same thing this season, trading in an older PlayStation for a PlayStation 2. It's all very exciting.

So my son was in town for 10 days, and we played video games. We played on my brother's Nintendo 64, an older game system we borrowed for the occasion, and we played on my computer. We played until my brains began leaking out my ears, though the boy never seemed to suffer any ill effects.

My parents are worried about that teenage brother of mine. Apparently, video games are his only interest in the world. He has no academic interests, reads literature that is far below his grade level (although his reading comprehension is fine), and plasters his bedroom walls with pictures of video game characters and posters from video game magazines. He invests only the minimal effort in anything that does not involve video games, keeping his grades only high enough to ensure that he is not banned from his video games. This may be normal for a teenager—I sure wouldn't know—but it is so astoundingly unlike the bookish, introspective, and extremely nerdy other children my mother has raised that she's quite concerned.

I'm not terribly thrilled about my son's interest in video games either, but he's not yet nine years old. I pray and suspect that he'll grow out of it, hopefully soon. My brother is fifteen or sixteen, and my family is beginning to wonder if he'll be like this the rest of his life.

If he is, he won't be the only one. A quick look at popular web sites reveals that there is an astounding number of twentysomethings and thirtysomethings who live their life around Gamecubes, PlayStations, and other silly-sounding things. Even more disturbing is the realization that it is not business, but games that drive the computer market. The steadily increasing technology of home computers is almost entirely driven by the need to create computers that are sophisticated enough to play computer games at a reasonable amount of speed. These boxes, the great achievement of the information age, have more to do with time-wasting escapism than any achievement of intellect or creativity.

While I was working myself into a snit over this state of affairs, my best friend bought an Atari joystick. For those of you who don't know, the first popular game system, the Atari 2600, hit it big about 20 years ago. Overpriced and capable of playing a wide variety of incredibly simple games, the Atari 2600 allowed my generation to amuse themselves with colored blocks, simple controls, and incredibly annoying sound effects. And since the nostalgia of Gen-Xers is particularly high, some clever company has now started making Atari 2600 joysticks, and putting simple computers in them that allow the joystick holder to play ten popular Atari 2600 games.

I want to make a point clear to non-Gen-Xers: these games were bad. We're really talking Pong-level, here. No one could possibly enjoy these games except through nostalgia. And, I have to admit, I enjoy them. There were few things that caused me pleasure in my childhood. Books were certainly one of them, but I simply don't enjoy children's books like I used to. The books that seemed so intense and wise to me 20 years ago now seem simplistic and shallow. Atari 2600 games, on the other hand, are as simplistic and shallow as they always were. The nostalgia is undiluted by a new, adult perspective.

As far as I can tell, that's the appeal of video games. People like things that are shallow and stupid. I hardly need to prove this point. Witness television. Video games are more immersive than television, and contemporary video games are far more immersive than Atari 2600 games, but they're still outstandingly stupid. Most painful are the video games that attempt to tell a story, because the story invariably reads like it was written by a fourth-grader who bumped his head on a meth lab. No great artistic leaps are being made by the video game industry, that's for damn sure, and not horribly surprising. Video games cost $50 a pop, and very few people will spend $50 to have their intellect challenged and mind expanded. Speaking of which, wasn't Madonna's book $50?

I would be remiss if I did not mention the Interactive Fiction community, a small group of ultra-geeks who create non-commercial, text-only computer games for artistic purposes. But for the most part, video games are slightly less intelligent than the latest Will Smith sequel. If you're old enough and childless enough to have missed out on the phenomena, count yourself very, very lucky.

They're also, incredibly enough, addictive. I guess I shouldn't really be surprised by this. After all, alcohol never made anybody smarter, and it's addictive. But the pleasure of alcohol is very easy to understand. The pleasure of video games consists of moving colored blocks in combination with other colored blocks. Granted, these days the colored blocks look an awful lot like people and cars, but still…

Yet their addictive properties are real, let me assure you. My distaste for computer games changed to a rabid hatred in the latter half of 2000, when I became an EverQuest widower.

Seriously. I didn't make that phrase up. Which is to say, I'm not the only one.

EverQuest is a computer game that allows you to log on to the Internet and pretend to be a Tolkienesque fantasy character on a huge game map with thousands of other Internet-savvy people, all of whom are pretending to be Tolkienesque fantasy characters. In EverQuest, you can hunt monsters and go on quests, but also form friendships, guilds, and, I shit you not, marriages. In other words, you can do all the things you don't have time for in the real world, because you're spending all your time playing EverQuest.

In 2000, the woman I was living with became addicted to a number of on-line games, including EverQuest, and dropped all her real-world friends and social contacts, until I eventually left. Now, I am aware that if your partner leaves you for a video game, there is something fundamentally wrong with the relationship before this happens. Nonetheless, there's no great loss of dignity in having a woman leave you. Having a woman leave you for a video game is without question the most embarrassing thing conceivable.

Furthermore, my ex did not use EverQuest simply to leave me and move on with her life. She hasn't moved on with her life. She's descended into a spiral of complete social isolation. She has replaced all of her old friends with computer game buddies. Her beaus, these days, are fellow EverQuest players who live in other states. She drives to see them periodically, resisting any local relationship and the difficulties it would involve.

And like I say, she's not the only one. I didn't, couldn't, make the phrase EverQuest widower up. Support groups are being formed, and get write-ups in magazines like Salon. Gen-X is being forced to take this, probably the silliest problem ever to plague mankind, seriously.

Silliness, and silliness which erodes human contact, is not a new thing on the planet. We've already mentioned television, and if an involuntary shudder of horror did not escape you, there's something wrong with you. No one talks about being a television widower, but that's because television addicts can partner with other television addicts, and sit around watching television together, never noticing that they are watching television alone. But before there were EverQuest widows, there were sports widows, a term which was generally applied lightly, with none of the hand-wringing that is associated (by those who know the term) with the term EverQuest widow.

Some might say this difference is due to the fact that Gen-Xers are typically whinier than previous generations, but I'm not buying it. I think people laugh at the term "sports widow" because sports widows are almost always women, and EverQuest widows come in all genders and sexualities. When men ignore their wives in favor of idiot games on the idiot box, it's one thing, but when women ignore their husbands in favor of idiot games on the new idiot box, it's a whole new issue.

And lest you misunderstand me, I'll clarify: sports are idiot games. Sports are stupid, and if you enjoy sports, you are stupid. I can't emphasize this enough. Spare me your bullshit about the strategy involved in baseball or football; if you were interested in strategy, you'd play chess, or even fucking checkers. While those who actually play sports, as opposed to those pathetic slobs who simply watch sports, are at least getting exercise, I exercise by walking around my neighborhood and get to not only listen to music, but partake in a pastime far more worthy than any sport: thinking. You just can't think while playing a sport. It keeps your mind busy with its stupidity.

Human interaction based around sports is not real social interaction. There is nothing social or human about debating who will win the pennant. It's the opposite of society. I am aware that many people, considered very intelligent by their peers, enjoy sports. But the enjoyment of sports is the quintessence of stupidity. To voluntarily spend time turning your brain completely off, by absorbing it in abstract, meaningless silliness. To eschew real human contact in favor of a game.

Of course, literature doesn't involve real human contact, and literature is pretty much my whole fucking life. But literature is, inescapably, about human contact. True, when a person starts reading, he or she will likely immerse his or herself in abstract fantasy that has no basis in real human interaction and takes him or her as far from reality as possible (oh, look, we're back to Tolkien). But eventually, such literature fails to satisfy. The reader invariably moves towards books that teach one about humanity, not distance one from it. The reader may continue to read "fantasy," but the nature of those fantasies will change.

Video games don't change. They're no more intelligent today than they were when I got my first Atari 2600. They just get more immersive. I strongly suggest that you drop yours today, unless you also enjoy sports, in which case you're too stupid for me to even talk to.



Jonathan Penton is the overworked editor and publisher of Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.