By Gregor Stronach
I am constantly being gleefully informed that we live in the digital age. Things aren’t what they used to be, and it’s the advent of digital technology that has changed the urban landscape in which we all live.
I can remember the great leaps forward in technology that have occurred in my lifetime – calculators that played games, Nintendo Game and Watch machines (hopelessly impractical for telling the time, by the way, as battery life was severely limited by playing the games), and digital watches that played games (which, much like the Nintendo games, were just crappy). And then TV Tennis came along, and shook the globe to its core.
Homes around the world reverberated to the sounds of ultra-competitive fathers proving mastery of hand-eye co-ordination over their infant children. There were screams as spouses began to beat seven shades of shit out of each other, following allegations of cheating, reprogramming and – shock-horror – handset tampering.
Tampering with the handsets to ensure victory was no easy feat. Early attempts included the addition of substances such as boiling water and even gin to adversely effect the operation of the controllers, sending TV Tennis combatants sailing to the top of the screen, never to return after each serve took place. I personally was stabbed with a butter knife by an angry sibling following one episode of tampering. Thankfully, the knife struck a rib, and the world was spared another premature funeral.
As the world has become a more technologically savvy place, it seems odd that the great leaps and bounds in software and hardware technology have been poured into two places first – billion dollar defence systems and multi-billion dollar gaming console empires.
Sony, once famous for bad transistor radios and hellishly good cocaine parties at its record label headquarters, has emerged as the force to be reckoned with. Even the world’s richest man, with a personal army of socially dysfunctional four-eyed nerds, can’t produce a better gaming system than the lovely, lovely people at Sony.
Why am I being so nice to Sony? Have I sold out to the big dollar corporation? Or am I just trying as hard as I can to get a free Playstation 2?
No…it’s fear that’s driving me today. I know that Sony has secretly been spending billions and trillions on getting some of the ideas from its computer games off our TV screens, and into our defence budgets. It’s a natural progression from Sony Corp to Sony Corps.
I can see it now. If the technology isn’t frightening enough, then picture this: The battle has been fought and won by the world’s computers. The Microsoft X-Box has been body-slammed from the top rope by Playstation, with Nintendo relegated to waterboy for the event.
But when the real war starts – the ground war to mop up the stragglers – the future is very real and very scary. Hoards of teenagers with wide eyes, astonishing reflexes, hand-eye co-ordination and over-developed thumbs will take to the streets in a orgy of looting, shooting and driving fast cars.
And I’ll be there, in the front line, my Lamborghini Diablo idling effortlessly at the lights, waiting to prove that it is me, and only me, who can be the true champion of the world. I will, of course, be armed with the latest in high-powered miniaturised assault weaponry, most of it mounted somewhere on the vehicle. Add to this a thumping soundtrack of my own creation, and the world is thus destined to be my oyster. Join me, my gaming-mad brothers and sisters.
This revolution will not be televised. This revolution has been live.
First published at Rum and Monkey – if you can believe this, in 2002 !
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I am happy playing Spider (Difficult).
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I’m happy reading, doing crosswords, seeing movies (in cinema), listening to good music.
Everything is so noicy these days.
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I used to enjoy crosswords, Helvi, though I haven’t done one in years… But that’s probably because a) I haven’t read a newspaper in many years… and b) I haven’t been on any long rail, sea or air voyages in many years either…
As for music, what did you think of Wazza’s Celtic selection? (And also my additions to it).
🙂
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Spider, Vivienne? Don’t think I know this one… unless you’re referring to the ‘Spider’ layout of the electronic version of ‘Mah Jong’, which is nothing whatsoever like the real game of Mah Jong, but rather a slightly more sophisitcated version of a card game we used to play as kids called ‘memory’…
🙂
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I never got further than ‘Pac-man’, in the local pub…The Nell Gwynn, in The King’s RD. It was about 70 yards from my shop at 559 King’s Rd…And about 100 yards from, what was reputedly, one of Nell’s abodes.
It was dilapidated, with overgrown gardens in those days.
For anyone I have bored in the past with snippets of my business life, here’s a bit of history, pasted from a site somewhere in digital land:
Nell Gwynn was born in 1650 and died in 1687 she was born to humble origins, she once sold oranges on the street until she got her first acting break in theatre and grew up to be an excellent singer and dancer. She caught the eye of the then King, Charles II and became his mistress, at 19, for the rest of his life, she was the most popular of his long line of mistresses. It is rumoured that on his death bed he whispered ‘what will become of my poor Nelly’. The Kings Road one of the most prestigious fashion district in London gets its name from ‘poor Nelly’, for when the king was visiting her from his palace, the roads were full of highwaymen, to avoid any meeting with this bunch, the King bought all the land from his palace to Nelly’s house, and since then it has been called the Kings Road. Nell bore the King two sons and died at 37. ‘end paste’
Nell, started acting when she was 14 and was among the first actresses (now laughingly called actors) actually employed in The London Theatres.
My staff always beat me at Pac-man. However I was the one that Mike, the Irish landlord, kept behind for the lock-in at The Nell.
It was on those occasions that Ronnie, a true cockney ne’er-do-well, and I, played one-handed pool. After which, full of joie de vivre, we sauntered down The King’s Rd, often pub-hopping until we bumped into Ronnie’s ne’er-do-well mates, ensconced in one of the numerous hostelries that bristled Chelsea. Especially around The World’s end: a haven for unsavoury characters and rapscallions. Each one able to recount a more villainous tale than the other. All of them impeccably dressed with cashmere pullovers and cardigans.
Ronnie was a patriarch of the area. A Falstaff. A larger than life character. Everyone knew him and he knew something about everyone.
More of him another day.
‘Digital Age’…Bah, Humbug and , ” who gives a toss; it’s not real life “, as Ronnie would say.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_End,_Kensington_and_Chelsea
Posting this, just to avoid any confusion with ‘The World’s End pub at Camden.
I know that Algy an others have sample a few London hostelries in the past.
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I think I had a couple of pints at the World’s End in Chelsea on at least one occasion, VL, though it would never have served as my ‘local’; in any case that position was well and truly filled by the Old Swan… even when we were squatting in Brixton! (On Railton Road; this is the street where the riots started; locally it is known simply as ‘The Front Line’!)
Capital of Jamaica, is Brixton!
😉
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You really oughta try Medieval II Total War, VL… just the game for a megalomaniac! (Yes, I suppose that IS why I play it too! But I like to think that exercising my natural tendency towards megalomania in this fashion helps me forego its use in other ways… In any case, it would be far too frustration to be a megalomaniac and to be right on the bottom of the heap as I am, anyway!)
This is the game that Risk wanted to be when it grew up and evolved into the digital age version of itself… Far better than either Monotony or Clueless… and much, much better than Squabble!
😉
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2002!
Shit, that was precociously prescient, Gregor!
The gleam in your eye and the craziness of your enthusiasm had, only for a nanosecond, mind, conjured up before me, a terrifying apparition of GW Bush sitting behind the wheel of his Lamb Diablo, shouting, “yiiihaaaaaa, we’re going to Airak! Only for a nanosecond, mind!
Never got into gaming, meself but I thought that scanners was the most brilliant tool invented for teachers of English. I’d scan articles from newspapers, paste them onto a word document, create spelling and syntactical errors, add questions at the bottom and bingo! you had the day’s lesson on grammar, clear thinking (silly!) and precis, all done! Used to be up half the night scanning stuff!
Then I had my first digital scan at my GP’s. (Secret men’s business) and thought, I hate this digital era. Thankfully, when the digit was removed I was deemed to be well enough to send enraged emails to Telstra!
Great piece, Gregor. Many thanks.
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