I smoke two joints when I play videogame… and at every ten thousand points…

No, I do not really smoke two joints when I play a videogame. It is a quote from a song, Smoke Two Joints, by The Toyes. If I did smoke two joints at every ten thousand points while playing some 1990s-era videogames, I could well be the first person to die of marijuana overdose. And really, what better way could there be to introduce a rambling about the subject of videogames from prior eras, namely before the whole mass-marketing bubble, that I would gladly throw everything from this era into the sewage in order to play again?

The Last Ninja, a quiet retrospective

In the year of 1987, a publisher called System 3 brought forward a game called The Last Ninja for the Commodore 64 (and other computers). The Commodore 64 was then, in spite of numerous advancements in computer manufacturing, the most widespread home computer product in history. It would remain such until a small handful of years later, when the inexorable pressure of business and wider acceptance drove consumers to greater, more powerful platforms.

Role-playing games, World Of Warcraft, and other interesting considerations

I am sure that readers of earlier entries on this journal already know this, but I will repeat it for the benefit of those who came in late. I play the MMORPG known as World Of Warcraft. I play it a lot. When I was a child, I read about things referred to in computer magazines called Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs. And with some qualifications, MMORPGs are sort of what I imagined when I read those articles.

The games we play… and what they say about us. E.T. as an example.

In modern culture, a lot of things have a tendency to descend to descend into a pissing competition. Nowhere is this more true than in videogames, an art from that, in spite of what many would like us to believe, seems to be regressing in spite of how much technology we throw at it. (To be fair, the same is proving to be true of cinema, music, and literature.) In order to understand what I mean, it is necessary to go back in time somewhat to the early to mid 1980s, when a little boy had his head so firmly buried in the television that people began to wonder if something was wrong (aww, really?) and if so, how to correct it (you know how it goes). If you did not live in this era, it is pointless for me to try and explain how different things like television and communication were then. The combination of mass networking, highly-affordable (especially by the standards of those days) desktop computing, and portable telephony has changed the world so radically that unless you have lived at least five to ten years of your life in a time before those things, you cannot begin to imagine how different the world was prior to then. And by a time before those things, I mean before more than one out of ten twelve to fifty year olds per street knew what a modem was, leave alone had one. (The street I lived on through most of my boyhood was an irregular oval forming an outer ring around two blocks that was only interrupted by the fenced-off grounds of a community hall. When I was six years old, I was the only one I knew of who had access to a Commodore 64. By the time I was 13, that number had expanded to include four families.)