Ping
I can remember, back in the 1970s, a very novel machine suddenly appeared in motorway services. It had a screen, and two knobs by which two short white lines could be induced to travel vertically up and down the left and right edges of the screen. It was the first computer game to be presented to the public, and could well have been called Ping, had they not called it Pong.Not very long after that the game became available to buy, in the form of a little box that could be connected to a TV set. Oh, the thrill of being able to move -to your own your will- an image on your TV screen. Up till then television sets could only deliver passive amusement, but now we could be in control. What a feeling of power that was. Of course, you needed to have children in whose name you bought the game, but they rarely got anywhere near it.
Things moved on quite quickly during the subsequent years, and computer games became very sophisticated. I couldn’t keep away from Tomb Raider for a few months, although the driving force behind that was not so much a desire to get to the next level, but rather a compulsion to get lara Croft to do something -I finally had to concede- she was not designed to do. I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone though; computer games were for kids.
How things have changed. I work with a man in his sixties who freely boasts about how many rampaging aliens he killed on the pervious night. There is a thriving market in adult computer games, and grownups are no longer ashamed or self conscious about playing them. Of course, they are not playing games -as a child might be described as doing- they are “gaming”. A designation the industry came up with to turn childish play into a legitimate adult activity. A rose by any other name.
Comments (31)
I enjoyed the read. thanks...
I like colouring in, particularly with sparkly gel pens.
It's got track, battery operated engines, loads of bricks and things...
Seeing as you already did your homework this morning, you wanna come over for tea at my house?
Was the first step in boys being allowed to be .....
Well girls
But when my son was a child Lego only seemed to come in specific sets. Star Wars etc. When I was a kid you could buy all the different shapes and sizes of bricks separately. That allowed you to go wherever your imagination took you; your only constraint being the limitations of what Lego bricks were capable of, but that only meant your imagination had to work harder. You will no doubt make fun of this -and I would enjoy it immensely if you did- but I honestly believe that those hours I spent playing with Lego bricks shaped my approach to life. Even to this day I find it hard to accept that you can't make something turn at 45 degrees, even though you know it was only designed to turn at 90. There has to be a way round it, surely.
What's for tea, btw?
The trouble with the modern sets is not only the loss of imaginative input, but of developing cognitive function. A set with instructions doesn't allow for free sequencing and strategy development.
Another study demonstrated that children learn more effectively when manipulating toys in primary colours. Back in the 90's when pastel coloured Lego appeared in the pink aisles of Toys-R-Us, our girls' learning was being disadvantaged.
Toys are really important and they shape us. As we play with them in our formative years, they also stay with us into adulthood.
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I'm a natural.
Even at your expense