What’d you do in order to play your favourite game? Would you steal your father and grandmother’s savings in order to buy the game no matter of the consequences? Would you sell yourself for two bucks at a local carpark? How about going to a bank with a shotgun and demand coinage? Space Invaders might seem like a relic, an irrelevant little game compared to the mammoth works of today, but that’s just a handful of desperate things people did to get few more runs on the arcade machine.
The vidkids have everything on streaming services and always-online storefronts. There’s a generation brewing who don’t know how to use .torrent files or the even have the hardware to make copies of library-leased music CDs. Just hit Youtube and put a playlist on. No need to rig homemade appliances to trick the machines for more lives and free quarters. Target of cheating has gone from messing against the computer to upgrading the player’s aim and life in multiplayer for unfair and artificial advantage.
As much as playing games has changed, people still do desperate things to fulfill that want all the while laying out methods to win against the odds.
All this is a story that’s just as much about Space Invaders as a game as it is as a phenomenon. The exaggerations of Japan running out of coins because of the game adds to its lore, when in reality it was mostly due to materials in the coins changing. If you ask stories from people who frequented local arcades and pinball parlors in their teenage years, the stories would make great summer blockbuster plots.
Players discussing tactics and tricks among each other at seedy and dark arcades turned into kids talking about secret tiles in Super Mario and Metroid, and now we have shattered communities and closed circles discussing the same things on forums and chat groups. The sanitation of electronic gaming was an integral part of it going mainstream, of if becoming the biggest form of entertainment we have.
The criminal activity of entertainment salons have transformed into legal actions of preventing customers from owning their purchases all the while splitting games into smaller sections to be sold at a later date. As much as the gaming industry protests how development has changed and become more expensive, intending to justify nickeling and diming the customer with horse armours and whatnot, the industry doesn’t seem to be wanting to fix these issues. Just like recycling and plastic, the fault has been put on the player rather than on the manufacturer.
We really should never have abandoned the glass bottle for plastic.
Electronic gaming has always had an interesting dilemma with adults and kids. I should not find it strange how gaming has been associated with children, treating arcades and consoles as children’s toys. The reality, even in the fifties, was that it was young adults and other rebels who went for pinball parlors. While the arcades of the late 1970s and 1980s were filled with kids, adults were no stranger to attractive blinking lights and cacophonic sounds of the time. When the first home consoles were brought homes, it was the whole family that got addicted to these simpler games. Whole house block parties would circle around these consoles much like how people did gather around to see the first picture radios.
The demographic of play has never changed. The generations and people for sure, as have what’s currently popular. People who claim Computer games are for children! probably never noticed the difference between arcades, consoles and computers. They never noticed the piano player next door getting addicted to Breakout to the point of mapping out the variety of functions the bar had. Nor would they notice how he went out to find the people who worked on the game to ask about its more hidden functions.
If gaming has always been passion of everyone, then technology has allowed that passion to be expressed and acted upon without checks. From a salaryman playing with a calculator on airplane to kill to having a powerful computer with a screen in your pocket, we’ve come a long way just to play and entertain ourselves.
The English language suffers for not having a distinction between playing (a game) and playing (with toys.) Perhaps that’s why it is so easy to brand electronic games as toys as the mental association between the two forms of play is easy to do. Sports exists simply to divide itself from other forms of play despite it being no different from playing e.g. Street Fighter at the base sense.
And a game it has to be. A set of rules all participants have agreed to and governed by. Playing is always participatory, requires intentional action and decision-making. It may be practice for adult life when we are children, when there are actual stakes at hand and the end result matters, but playing for fun doesn’t die.
Everyone likes to play. The games are just different. We won’t ever again see the massive boom Space Invaders caused because of the sheer amount of games being released every week is staggering. Each of these games are magnitudes more complex and richer in visuals than the humble Taito game, but we don’t see the mainstream going haywire over any game in any significant manner. Only the hardest of the core enthusiasts bend themselves backwards for the latest big titles release the gaming media has advertised.
Society has gone increasingly analog, and even the jaded people are thinking back how media used to gather people together. Digitally, we are present only in voice, connected by the Information Highway. We may be playing the same games and watching the same shows, but that tangible presence of another person is missing.
Electronic games keep fascinating people as a social thing. Even when the lone enthusiast champions their favourite Triple A disaster, they do so because of emotional connection to the game and the corporation it represents. There’s no cold logic in play, just boiling hot emotions thrusting to the surface. Perhaps shilling Starfield nowadays would be the modern equivalent of whoring yourself out in the carpark to get some coin for more Space Invaders.
Aaltomies 