An Addendum on Computer Games
Earlier this week I wrote about how I was playing a little bit of Moon Patrol at work. What makes this even more interesting is that I otherwise seem to have lost my taste for computer games in general, or at least my taste for playing games for hours and hours. Somewhere, my sixteen-year-old self is very confused.
It's no exaggeration to say that the reason I'm a computer programmer today is that I wanted to write computer games when I was a kid. I consumed a steady diet of shareware and pirates games, notably all the Sierra games. Sierra once had a ten-year-anniversary catalog that talked about how little teams of 10-12 people wrote all their games, and the idea of writing games with a small group of friends really appealed to me.
When I got to college, I learned that in the essentially pre-internet days of 1996, all the major video games were being put out by huge companies with massive production teams and lots of video cut scenes. Well, maybe not Id, but those guys were geniuses, and I was no genius. I also learned that due to supply and demand, most video game programmers were paid poorly and overworked greatly. After all, there were always more college kids who'd gotten into computers to write games. So I really kind of lost interest and got into other things.
I still played them. A lot of my time in college was spent gaming, whether it was Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Alpha Centauri or any of a host of other games that absorbed time that probably would have been better spent studying, or at least talking to girls. For several years after college my gaming habits were consistent before I eventually got into more of the hobbies I have now. Eventually I stopped playing more or less completely. Sometimes I wondered if I was missing out on some little clique at work because the vast majority of my coworkers go home and then play video games together online, and I wasn't.
Nowadays I rarely have time for games. Over Christmas two months ago I actually had some free time, so I pulled down Wesnoth and played it for three or four hours. I had fun while I was playing, but afterwards I felt disgusting, like I had just woke up hung over after a three day binge*. I just felt like I'd been utterly unproductive and that I should have done something else. Since then I haven't played anything else at home.
I don't think it was the game; I'd enjoyed Wesnoth in the past and had fun while I was playing. Apparently, I'm just not interested anymore. This confirms something I began to suspect last summer, when Neal & Rachel's sons explained Minecraft to me, and I completely failed to understand it. For the first time I had an inkling of what my parents must have felt like when I explained my computer games to them. This feeling was exacerbated when Brian & Jen came to my Black Friday party and their daughters tried to get me to play Temple Run. I was confused, and not really interested.
I can't tell you if this feeling is permanent, or if some game might one day grab my attention and force me to play it again. Either way, it is still a little weird to have that visceral physical reaction even though I haven't really been a gamer in years.
*Not that I have any experience with that.
It's no exaggeration to say that the reason I'm a computer programmer today is that I wanted to write computer games when I was a kid. I consumed a steady diet of shareware and pirates games, notably all the Sierra games. Sierra once had a ten-year-anniversary catalog that talked about how little teams of 10-12 people wrote all their games, and the idea of writing games with a small group of friends really appealed to me.
When I got to college, I learned that in the essentially pre-internet days of 1996, all the major video games were being put out by huge companies with massive production teams and lots of video cut scenes. Well, maybe not Id, but those guys were geniuses, and I was no genius. I also learned that due to supply and demand, most video game programmers were paid poorly and overworked greatly. After all, there were always more college kids who'd gotten into computers to write games. So I really kind of lost interest and got into other things.
I still played them. A lot of my time in college was spent gaming, whether it was Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Alpha Centauri or any of a host of other games that absorbed time that probably would have been better spent studying, or at least talking to girls. For several years after college my gaming habits were consistent before I eventually got into more of the hobbies I have now. Eventually I stopped playing more or less completely. Sometimes I wondered if I was missing out on some little clique at work because the vast majority of my coworkers go home and then play video games together online, and I wasn't.
Nowadays I rarely have time for games. Over Christmas two months ago I actually had some free time, so I pulled down Wesnoth and played it for three or four hours. I had fun while I was playing, but afterwards I felt disgusting, like I had just woke up hung over after a three day binge*. I just felt like I'd been utterly unproductive and that I should have done something else. Since then I haven't played anything else at home.
I don't think it was the game; I'd enjoyed Wesnoth in the past and had fun while I was playing. Apparently, I'm just not interested anymore. This confirms something I began to suspect last summer, when Neal & Rachel's sons explained Minecraft to me, and I completely failed to understand it. For the first time I had an inkling of what my parents must have felt like when I explained my computer games to them. This feeling was exacerbated when Brian & Jen came to my Black Friday party and their daughters tried to get me to play Temple Run. I was confused, and not really interested.
I can't tell you if this feeling is permanent, or if some game might one day grab my attention and force me to play it again. Either way, it is still a little weird to have that visceral physical reaction even though I haven't really been a gamer in years.
*Not that I have any experience with that.