“Everything not saved will be lost.” ~Nintendo ‘Quit Screen’ message
When I was a kid in the late 80s and early 90s, I liked playing video games.
I started out with an Atari 2600, then a Nintendo Entertainment System, then a Sega Master System,
and then finally my last video game console, a Super Nintendo. Friends would come round and
we’d jump on for half-an-hour, or an hour or so, and then we’d go outside and play. It wasn’t like
we’d spend all day playing video games. Maybe on rainy days we’d spend a bit longer on them,
but these machines certainly didn’t interrupt our social lives – They probably enhanced them.
In the early 90s, when I was a teenager,
we also liked hanging out at the local arcade. Even though we had access to video games at home,
that certainly didn’t stop us from going and hanging out with our friends.
The local arcade that we frequented was called the “FunHouse” and every Friday night, it would have a
so-called “Lock-in” from 6 to 9pm. You could play as many games as you liked for like five dollars.
It was a place to hang out with friends, have a good time, drink soft drink, eat chips,
meet girls, and our parents were happy because we were “locked-in” and it was fully supervised.
We wouldn’t go every week, but maybe like once or twice a month. It was a great night out.
But then around 1995/1996, the very popular PlayStation was released in Australia.
With a combination of impressive 3D graphics and a great selection of games,
it pretty much sounded the death knell for the video game arcade.
From the mid 90s to the early 2000s, pretty much every arcade in my area closed up shop.
They just couldn’t compete with the home console market anymore.
But that didn’t spell the end for video game socialisation. Even though all the big arcades
had closed down, during my university days in the late-90s / early 2000s, we would still get
together on a Friday night to play console games. We’d book out a lecture theatre,
plug in a Nintendo 64, and play multiplayer games on the big screen. It was a great night out.
After I graduated uni in 2001, I got a job in Osaka, Japan.
Despite arcades losing popularity in Australia, they were still big business in Japan. But they
instead focused more on multiplayer social and physical sorts of games. Things like dancing
and rhythm games and so on. Retro games were also very popular. We would go out on a Friday
night to these massive multi-floored arcades, which were certainly not just for teenagers.
People of all ages would go. You’d take your girlfriend and have a great night out.
But when I came back to Australia in 2006, all my friends had moved passed consoles and were
now playing these massively multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft. I found that
the friends that I used to go to the arcade with, or play console games at the university,
were now locked up in their darkened bedrooms in front of their computer playing games online. They
didn’t want to go out anymore. They only went out to buy food or go to work, and the rest of
their time was spent playing games by themselves. Sure, they claimed they were socialising in-game
by chatting with their so-called friends, but there was no real socialisation. In my opinion,
this was the day that video games went from potentially enhancing people’s social lives,
to quite the opposite, destroying their social lives instead. Instead of gaming in person,
people chose to sit themselves in a darkened room all day long.
I knew couples that actually broke up because of it. Boyfriends were ignoring their girlfriends.
Instead of taking them out to the movies, they would instead make up some crappy excuse to stay
home and play computer games. Not to mention that all these games required quite literally hundreds
of hours of gameplay in order to attain the higher levels. For some of my friends,
gaming had become their full-time job, except they didn’t receive any compensation for their efforts.
Fast forward to the current era, and gaming has pretty much remained the same,
a fairly lonely pastime. I still know some guys who remain glued to their computer screens
playing video games all day long. They’ve achieved very little in their lives, except
that they’ve managed to buy themselves the latest gaming rig and have reached level 110 or whatever
in their latest game. Arcades still exist, but they have certainly gone from a fun place to hang
out with your friends, to more of a borderline gambling hall for children. The goal is to earn
tickets or win prizes. I knew a guy who was in Gamblers Anonymous for horse racing. He lost tens
of thousands of dollars playing the ponies. One day, we walked into one of these modern arcades
and he started playing a claw machine. He kept losing, but kept putting in dollar after dollar,
until I said, “Hey, what are you doing?”. He then realised that what he was doing was exactly like
gambling. Just because its in a kid’s amusement centre doesn’t mean it’s not gambling.
Anyway, I try not play games nowadays. Instead, I take my children outside a lot.
Although I did buy one of those retro Super Nintendo Classics with built in games.
My children use it exactly how I used to – They use it on occasion for half-an-hour, or an hour or
so, and when their friends come round, they enjoy playing it together. They never need to be told
to get off it or anything like that, they just find that they’ve had enough after an hour or so.
Anyway, that’s my thoughts on the death of video game socialisation.
It used to be good, but has pretty much become a world of isolation.