Dstillery Challenge: Gaming Culture & My First System

A note from Emily Slape, Digital Manager Editor:

“Dstillery is a service we use to connect with our audience by looking at their digital footprint, to better identify what their interests are. It gives us insight into what our audience wants to know more about when they visit our website. The Dstillery Challenge is when I choose one of the keywords that shows an area of interest to some of our audience. Then, Buzz has to write an article about the topic…and this is where the challenge comes in…WITHOUT RESEARCHING THE TOPIC AT ALL. Buzz has to write his entire article with only the knowledge, right or wrong, that he already has.

This week’s challenge is a topic that came in at #106 for our audience…Video and Computer Gaming Enthusiasts.”

BUZZ: What can I say about video and computer gaming enthusiasts that hasn’t already been said? Seriously, I’m asking.

OK…with the exception of Star Wars: Battlefront for the original X-Box I never really GOT the whole hubbub over video games. Sure, I was a kid when home video games came out. My first was the Odyssey game system which was SO lo-tech you had to tape transparent screens to your TV. Each transparency coincided with which game you wanted to play. If you wanted to play Pong you taped up the screen for Pong. If you wanted to do the racing game, there was a transparency for that. Also, your “character” was just a cursor.

So, for reasons that should be apparent, this wasn’t the kind of thing you would spend hours on and build an entire lifestyle around.

Next came video arcades. The quality of the games were a big improvement but your “gaming” was limited by the number of quarters you had. After you burned through your allowance and checked the floor for loose change, your “gaming” experience was over for the day.

At some point in there some of my friends started getting HOME computers and there were games you could play at home for ZERO quarters. Here’s how typical game-play would unfold:

COMPUTER TEXT: You enter a vault in the pyramid. There is an asp between you and the next door. What would you like to do now?

Then, you’d type in something like, “Jump over it”.

COMPUTER TEXT: The asp bit you. You are dead.

The point is, I never got into gaming because the games of my era either sucked or were prohibitively expensive. By the time the games got really, really good I had too many other things on my plate like, getting married, buying a home and getting divorced and moving back into an apartment.

One thing I will say about my generation (X, in case you were wondering) is that when we played video or computer games we PLAYED them. No matter how good Doug Wertman was at Defender nobody was going to send a significant amount of time WATCHING him play Defender. We might look over his shoulder for 30 seconds on our way to the snack bar to get nachos to see if he was getting close to the high score but that’s as far as it went. I don’t want to sound like THAT guy but I will never understand why people want to watch other people play video games. My theory? This is the generation that grew up watching their older brothers play video games. You had to wait your turn to play and, being the little brother, you probably did A LOT of waiting. Now, watching someone else play a video game seems like a good way to spend 7 hours. Feh, I says! KIDS these days!

Ok, so I guess I AM that guy.