My life's addiction, Part 1: The Electronic Babysitter

I can never remember there not being some kind of computer in the house.

Apart from amnesiacs and the occasional vacuum-tube-uber-geek, I am probably one of the oldest people around that can truthfully make that claim. Growing up as a kid of the 80's - born in Kentucky but moving into middle-class-Michigan-ville at the age of two - some of my earliest memories consist of my father bringing home and setting up our family's first computer. The box - a Franklin Ace1200, a Commodore 64 clone. A lethally heavy contraption, huge and magical to my four-year-old eyes, with an attached monochrome green-screen monitor, side-by-side 5.25" floppy drives (a double-decker!), and of course, no internal hard drive, this machine would open me up to a world that, at the age of 28, I have yet to leave.

It's not an exaggeration to say that that computer played an important role in my early development. My dad had bought it largely so that my brother, four years older than me and just starting to hit homework that was challenging him, could type up reports for school and print them out, double-spaced and legible through the wonder of dot matrix technology. Being familiar with them from his work as a chemist (and boring us to death with stories of how computers had revolutionized mass spectroscopy and gas chromatography), he was in early on the secret that computers were the future. And so, in discussion with my mother, my father was able to justify plunking down a couple thousand dollars of early-80's money to the local computer store downtown, and, with no help at all, plug it in and set up the CP/M operating system.

I took an interest to the computer right away. Why, I couldn’t say – it just seemed magical, how this warm, humming, electronic box could translate my hunt-and-peck typing into symbols on an electronic screen. As he has later confided to me, my interest surprised my father, who had originally assumed that I was too young. I had yet to start kindergarten – though my mother had already taught me how to read, and assured me, with braggadocio that in retrospect seems like it should have been insufferable, that I was well beyond many of her high school students – but the computer was a grown-up tool, for tasks that involved things of which I should have been capable. Word processing (the word processor we used was called WordStar – the king back in its heyday, but that sadly did not survive) for reports and letters, a spreadsheet (Lotus in the hizzouse!), and of course a few games, far too sophisticated for the four-year-old, but endless entertainment for my brother.

It was my Mom that first gave me a good reason to sit at the computer; recognizing that my ability to read had progressed to the point where I should be able to form my own words in print. My physical dexterity was still a bit too low to hold a pencil and write anything coherent for very long, but the computer’s keyboard was an ideal solution. Though my Mom didn’t know thing one about computers (and frankly, still doesn’t), she was the reason I learned to type before I learned to write. To this day I blame her for my atrocious penmanship.

It took a few years before I truly discovered games; the computer had come with a few, but my family, seeing it just as a tool, had mostly ignored them. My brother was the one who eventually found them; a game called Karateka, which was a primitive side-scroller, a version of Pong, a few other primitive titles that have since fled from my memory. I played a bit, but was no match for my brother at first, until my dad game home with a disk labeled "Lode Runner".

My brother was busy, so my Dad showed it to me first. He said some people from work had talked about it, and that it was a little different than most games in that it made you use your head. "That means you'll be really good at it," he said, as he ruffled my hair and sat down behind me to let me figure it out.

The game has become a kind of obscure classic in time, and to me, that's always vindicated my taste; versions have been made for the TurboGrafx 16, PC, and I think there is a mobile phone version floating around somewhere, I think, but the game concept has endured. I doubt that many people have played the old Commodore version, but I remember thinking as I played it that the game was *ingenious*. I wasted hour after hour after countless hour on that game, and my Dad would have been worried at that, but he saw that, in a way, it was time spent productively – that the game helped my critical thinking skills, that it helped me with problem solving, and that I truly enjoyed it. At six, I was still involved in the normal kid activities, that I played soccer and hockey, and piano and trombone, and did all the things I was supposed to do, I had good grades and rarely watched much TV, so the hours in between spent in front of the computer never really seemed to bother him.

Still, I wasn't really yet a "gamer".

The first steps on that path, poetically, were due to my father's pragmatism. Every Thursday night, he and my mom would take part in a bowling league, teamed up with another couple, that the two knew from work. That meant getting together for dinner and a trip to the bowling alley. At first they hired babysitters, but my dad hit upon an idea. Since the bowling alley had an arcade, and my brother and I had both proven ourselves capable of keeping ourselves entertained for hours with video games, why not just drag us along with them, give us each $10 worth of quarters, and instructions not to get in, or cause, any trouble?

At first we resisted, but the Thursday night trips to the bowling alleys soon became a highlight of our week; the arcade games were *so much cooler* than the games we had for our computer; they had Dig Dug, and Centipede, and a Star Wars flight sim that was *3-DIMENSIONAL!* Pac Man, Galaga, Frogger - all of the staples that today we refer to as arcade classics. Today, you can download these games to your friggin' cell phone and barely scratch the surface of the memory you have available, but back then, these monstrosities required every inch of a refrigerator-sized box that gave off enough heat to fry an egg. Half the time, my parents were done bowling, and they'd have to drag us out of the arcade because we weren't done with our quarters yet (because, although some nights we would run badly and be busted within an hour, all in all we got very good at those games, beating even the occasional adult that wandered in and decided it would be fun to challenge us; earning replays was never a problem).

It's weird, the specific details that I remember: how the bowling alley (StarDust Lanes) had a hand-carved and painted sign that said "ARCADE!" in front of the portal that led to the small room; the musky air of smoke, the worn-out bowling alley ash trays, the way the pool table could return the cue ball but eat up all the other ones, the omnipresent bleeps and bloops emanating in a weird Arcade Surround Sound, the first encounters with profanity (teenagers and adults swearing at the games), words that I knew existed but didn't know the full social context of. The way that Josh, the son of the couple that my parents teamed up with, would occasionally come and go, but always seemed to get pissed off at the games, where my brother and I simply developed a friendly rivalry. In retrospect, I have a hard time seeing how they could put us there and not be scared to death.

(My parents, while political conservatives, were almost scary liberal when it came to their parenting technique, a matter of pride I concede to the fact that they drastically overestimated their childrens’ intelligence. When I was twelve and my brother was sixteen, the two of them left on a trip to New Orleans for an entire friggin’ WEEK and left the two of us alone. They received much flak for this from their contemporaries, but they knew us well – we didn’t cause trouble, at least not when we were alone. My parents always granted us enough freedom not to worry that we’d blow up when left to our own devices. Going off to college and seeing the scores of children still unable to handle independence, I eventually thanked them for that).

It was that damn arcade that paved my way. In a weird sort of way, I blame the fact that a $5 roll of quarters was less money than a babysitter for that fact that I just ordered a $4000 Alienware laptop. My parents were and are smart and pragmatic, but even they couldn’t hope to see that deep.