Game on

On this day in 1990 I made a note in my diary. I was taking a tutorial in my then university, and I noticed that one student was clearly pre-occupied with something he was holding under the desk, and whatever it was he was doing had attracted the attention of those sitting on either side of him. I decided I would check out what it was, and discovered it was a hand held gaming device – something new to me. In fact what the student was holding was a Game Boy, the then new device by Nintendo. I should have been annoyed perhaps, but always being keen on and interested in gadgets I let him take the thing above the table and explain what it did.

Of course computer gaming, which was not entirely new then, has become one of the key leisure activities of our age, and I shall admit I am someone who does occasionally dabble in it. But more to the point, on the whole I believe it has also provided us with tools for mental exercise that have been good, as well as sources of distraction and sometimes obsession that have been less good.

The Game Boy is still around, but perhaps with less of a raison d’être now that any number of functional hand held devices can hold games. But there is now a significant body of evidence to show that computer games can be useful educational tools. When properly used.

Play on!

I know that for some people with a particular kind of interest in computing May 22 is a red letter day. No, I am not thinking of Microsoft enthusiasts (the company released Windows 3 on this day in 1990); I am talking about people who will know what you’re on about when you mention Pakkuman; the kind of people who get excited at the thought of arcade games. Yes of course, we’re talking about May 22 1980, when the Japanese company Namco first released the game that would become famous as Pac-Man.

You don’t know what Pac-Man is? Oh come off it, of course you do – the yellow blob that moves across a maze of ‘pac-dots’ eating them and avoiding death meted out by various monsters. In the early days you could only play this game in pubs and gaming arcades, on booths that now look big enough to manage the US strategic defence shield. Later it was released for computers such as the Atari, the Commodore and various other machines that have long since been abandoned.

Looking at it now (as I did the other day) reminded me how basic and frankly terrible computing was in the 1980s But it also reminded me how some people I knew back then became obsessed with Pac-Man; a friend of mine used to go to his local pub solely so that he could play the game there.

I confess that I am undecided on the issue of whether computer games are harmful or not. Perhaps they develop certain skills in people (such as problem solving, as was recently suggested to me), but they also have the potential to isolate some of the more fanatic enthusiasts from society.

At any rate the simplicity of Pac-Man makes it a most effective game. And it still lives on.