Rules For Q*bert

Now here's a story with a proper dose of irony for you.  I am going to talk about how video games may not have been so bad for your brain as your parents told you, sort of.  Imagine that.  All those hours you spent thumbing your control pads or joysticks, shaking your Wii sticks and hoping they won’t come flailing off, hitting an unsuspecting partner or spectator while you dance up a storm, apparently isn’t that detrimental after all.  We have evolved our human thumbs in the last two generations so aptly as to invent a communication tool which relies heavily on our thumbs.  It’s called the cell phone, in case you were wondering where to get such a thing.  We have 3D movies pouring out of Hollywood faster than tanning spray off Christina Aguilera.  Owning a 50-inch TV is now not only the norm, but will likely soon be too small for the norm.  We can store our multimedia digital files on ‘clouds’, which we can access from anywhere.  I’m telling you, the ‘country music chip’ for your brain isn’t far away (some of you know what I mean by this, but for everyone else, you’ll hear about it in a future blog, no doubt).

It doesn’t seem like that long ago to me that video games were The Great Satan.  My ever-loving parents, who really did try to raise me in a home with good, wholesome influences surrounding me, never liked video games, and vowed that their children would never succumb to that great space invader of the child’s developing and fragile mind.  Young Brandon was never to have an Atari, Vic 20, Commodore 64, or Nintendo.  The first video gaming device we owned was a Tandy computer, and it wasn’t good for much except for typing and printing.  We owned a typewriter, but the Tandy was an actual ‘computer’, which immediately meant it was better.  Along with the Tandy, which of course had no internet access in 1986, came the inevitability of games to play on it.  Now, you could play games like the old consoles had, to some degree, but what the Tandy could do that consoles of that time could not was run games that involved strategic input from the player.  Role-playing games, such as the King’s Quest series, Leisure Suit Larry, and a host of other scenario games were readily available, and reasonably affordable.  You had to insert floppy discs—and I mean the old 5 1/4 inch ones, not the more recent-yet-still-obsolete 3 1/2 hard-cartridge discs.  My current PC is now 9 years old, and still has a floppy disc drive, so they had a good run it seems. 

Mom and Dad justified letting us play these games on the Tandy because the games themselves had evolved beyond simple call/response or reaction games like Donkey Kong or Asteroids.  Indeed, the new breed of games required the player to think about what would happen next, type commands into the computer and respond to what the computer had to say in response.  If you walked into a room in the castle dungeon, you might wander over to the wardrobe and ask the computer to open the door.  Maybe inside there was a secret weapon you could use.  Maybe a giant monster would jump out and crush you.  Either way, it was fun, and if the latter was true, you hopefully saved your game earlier and you could do something different next time.  Maybe you could hide under the bed while the evil wizard opened the wardrobe. You get the idea.

To some degree, my parents were right.  I didn’t waste my money on video games, and as a result, I focused my interest and energy on other things.  I read a lot, particulary the Hardy Boys books, a series which I still collect to this day (I mentioned this briefly in the last blog).  I developed a fondness for boardgames, and as an adult I am an avid gamer and owner of dozens of different styles of games, from simple party games to hours-long strategy games.  My money began to go to music purchasing, and as those of you who know me at all can attest, it’s still where most of my available funds go.  My first investment in a video game system was the Wii, which we bought as a family three years ago.  Still, I may have invested up to 2-3 hours total on it.  My sons adore the Wii, and Kieran recently declared that while music was my ‘thing’, video games were his.  Part of me was a little saddened, but an equal part of me understood. 

At school a few weeks ago, a few boys from my class were over near the swings playing in the fine gravel on which the swing sets are situated.  When I approached them, I noticed they were playing something I thought was long extinct.  They had a handful of little, green army men.  I was blown away.  I used to play with my Dad’s little army men when I used to stay with my Grandmother at her house while she watched me when my parents worked late.  They were pre-posed, and I had no real knowledge of the army, nor did I have the wherewithal to care about it, but they were fun to pose in mock battles, to make pretend gun noises while I maneuvered them around awkwardly.  When I made to congratulate them on finding some classic toys to play with at recess, they looked up with fear in their eyes.  It then occurred to me—they’re war toys.  In 2012, we’re afraid of war toys.  The world we live in doesn’t feel so easy about kids pretending to wield guns; the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ days are long gone. I remember playing ‘War’ in the thicket beside my house as a kid when my friends used to visit.  We had plastic rifles and assault weapons and we used to make forts, run recon missions and engage each other in open combat.  I even had a plastic bazooka.  We had paths through the woods worn down to the dirt.  We built platforms in high trees as look-out posts.  At the end of the day, we never realized how much we were developing our imaginations. And there I was, faced with the choice of whether to prevent them from playing ‘war’, or remember young Brandon who grew up to be Mr. LeBlanc, evidently none the worse for having played with toys like that himself.  I don’t think anyone that played ‘War’ in the thicket at my parents’ house ever grew up to shoot up a school, hold up a bank, or even obtain a hunting licence for that matter.  But man, did we ever have fun.  When I was visiting with my parents this past week, I stopped and looked into the thicket.  The paths are long grown in.  The forts are long gone.  My own children will never play the way we did.

When we were kids at Port Elgin Elementary School back in the 80’s, my friends and I ‘invented’ a game of our own.  Down a steep embankment, yet still on the grounds of the school, was an area where there were no trees, but the grass grew fairly tall.  Forming small islands in the hayseed were giant slabs of rock, probably about a dozen or so of them in an odd formation.  There were three or four large, flat ones, on which I’d say maybe five or six kids could stand at once.  The others were all a fraction of that size, and no more than one could stand on them without knocking another off.  We used to bounce from rock to rock, originally just goofing around, but gradually developing a sort of tag game.  Rules began to form, and word spread; before long, a dozen or more friends were making straight for the rocks as soon as the bell rang and we could get outside.  One day, someone finally suggested that our game was a lot like the then-popular arcade game Q*bert.  For those of you who weren’t children in the 80’s, Q*bert was a little creature who hopped on two legs on a wall of ascending cubes, whose goal was to touch every square before his enemies touched him.  Think Pac-man, but 2D and quicker.  Our game, of course, was much different.  Rather than have one Q*bert, our game had most people acting as Q*berts, while the ‘it’ person was his nemesis Coily (a snake who bounced like a spring on his coiled body).  The Q*berts all started on one of the giant rocks, while Coily started on a designated starting point in the middle.  The Q*berts had to hop from rock to rock until they safely made it to one of the other agreed-upon rocks at the far side without being tagged by Coily.  All this time, no one was allowed to leave the rocks at all.  If you did fall from one, you had to either go to a ‘prison’ rock, or start over, depending on who was playing and which rules were in play.  You see, in our version of Q*bert, we worked out a verbal agreement how to solve problems that arose during gameplay, and we moved on.  No one fought during Q*bert.  It was like an unwritten rule that if you spoiled the fun, you had no business being there.  And no one wanted to be banished from the rocks!

As a teacher today, I could find a host of things you couldn’t allow in a game like Q*bert.  First of all, rock formations like that would be removed from any playground.  If they weren’t, they’d be fenced off for sure, and duty teachers would be vigilantly policing them from children with over-active imaginations from playing near them.  Maybe the kids would pick up sticks and pretend to play war, mock-shooting each other like they might see on the news.  That wouldn’t be allowed either.  Too bad really, because all the skills they have been honing playing Call Of Duty would surely come in handy.  If it was winter, forget playing near the rocks.  A skinned knee might be as good as a lawsuit in 2012.  Never mind that you could smash heads playing soccer, or fall from monkey bars, or slip on an unseen patch of black ice.  Soon, we’ll need to bubblewrap the students to keep them safe. 

We have come full-circle with our video games; we worry so much about the dangers outdoors that we often let our children seek refuge in the one thing a generation ago we never thought possible.  We protect our children from two things:  the outside world and their own imaginations. Video games have lots to offer, and they’ve come a long way, even since the old Tandy Quest games from my childhood, and even then they helped foster critical thinking and creativity.  Ironically, my friends and I used a video game as a scenario for an original idea, for hours of harmless fun.   I would go so far as to say we were building character.  Perhaps we don’t give our kids enough credit.  Perhaps we think on their behalf more than we should.  We should rather remember when we were the Q*berts trying to get to the other side, back when Coily was just one of us, randomly picked for the fun of it.  I promise you, if the duty teacher ever came to play Coily, we’d have all left the rocks for good.