Video Games

I see that Sony has now come out with Playstation 3, and that there are people camping out in lines at stores to get their copy, even though Sony may have fucked up because some of their older games are not compatible with the new system. And to that, I happily say, I don’t care. I’m so glad I’m not caught up in that world. The only video game system I own is a Super Nintendo that is somewhere in the back of my closet, and four games, which I haven’t played in close to ten years.

Now I’m not immune to the seductive power of video games. I was around, kids, when they were invented, and we had a Pong in our house (I’m sure this sounds to younger people like it did to me when an older person said they had nothing to play with as a child but a hoop and a stick). In college, I used to go to the video arcade with a pocket full of quarters to blow off steam. I usually played Mousetrap or Berserker (“intruder alert!”). And while I worked at Penthouse, and had long afternoons of having no work to do, I would play Quake or Centipede on the computer, or LinksPro (Which I now play at home, the only computer game I own).

But I refuse to get caught up in the world of home video game systems. I don’t give a fiddler’s fart whether Playstation is better than Xbox, and even if I stumble into a fortune, I still won’t, because if I had the means to piss away money it would be traveling to far-off exotic places and having sex with shallow women, not spending my days in a darkened room maneuvering a joystick.

It’s an interesting thing, aging. Just as my grandmother has never used an ATM, and never will, I’ve reached the point where I kind of shrug and realize that there are certain technologies I probably will go to my grave without using. Video game systems are one, and the various methods of playing entertainment are another. I don’t own a TiVo, an I-Pod, an MP3 player, or a cell phone that takes video or pictures. I think it will send a text message, if I read the manual and figure out how, but I have no interest in that. Am I so starved for entertainment that I need to watch a TV show on a handheld device? I think I’d rather just daydream.

There are many who defend video games as art-forms, and I won’t quibble with that. Some of them sound interesting, and I guess they have carefully crafted worlds and actually, in their own way, tell a story. But there are only so many hours in the day, and frankly I’d rather be reading, watching a film, listening to music, or enjoying the outdoors rather than killing zombies or racing motorcycles or whatever it is people do when the play these things.