Unfortunately, I neither believe that video games are for hand-eye coordination, nor are they a brain blender. They’re ENTERTAINMENT. And they should be viewed as such.

I’ve been with video games when they started with pong. I got an Atari and a Commodore 64, roughly around the age of 6, so I, unlike Generation Y, KNOW video game adversity. If you remember THIS:

10 Print “Mike is cool”
20 For X = 1 to 100 : Next X
30 Goto 10

Then this essay is for you.

Remember the old days? You know, when home games weren’t the same quality as their quarter-guzzling counterparts in the arcade? I swear to God, last week I was in K-B Toys and saw one of those five dollar hand-held games with better graphics than the Pac-Man for Atari. But what did we care? We loved every last giant pixel on the screen.

Remember the first “console wars”? Atari vs. Coleco (with grubby little Intellivision skulking about in the shadows)? Commodore 64 Magazine was giving out the source-code to different games every month, so you could program crap like Spy Hunter for yourself.

It was a much simpler time.

I also remember, at the time, the first reports about children “wasting away” in front of video games took the spotlight on every news station. Silly bastards. We didn’t KNOW video game addiction until NINTENDO.

But was it addiction? Or was it just the fascination with something new?

Nintendo of America ushered in a new age of couch potato. Pissed off at your boss? Make Mario jump off a cliff a couple hundred times. Can’t find your keys? Help Ljnk find the fucking Tri-Force instead. America had a new way to get their minds off their problems. Sega jumped on the bandwagon just in time to go head-to-head with the Super Nintendo.

Fast forward a couple of years (we’ll skip over the Neo-Geo, Turbo-Graphix, Lynx, Sega Genesis CD-Drive era, because it was embarrassing for both manufacturers and consumers) to what I like to call the “Modern Age” of gaming (or simply put, “When Playstation, Nintendo 64, and Dreamcast Walked the Earth”). Games were using 64-bit graphics! Holy Shit! That was Amazing! I’m a computer professional, and I’m still not sure what that means! But whatever!

As far as I’m concerned, that’s when video games became a target. Now that video games were capable of producing realistic characters, an idiot parent could blame video games, and not lack of parenting, for why their son maims small animals, or shoots up a high school.

And I suppose this is where my essay starts to come together and make sense. There’s nothing wrong with video games. Video games aren’t responsible for keeping children indoors. Barbie and GI Joe (and goddamn TV in GENERAL) did that long before the 1980’s. Children aren’t dumb because video games stole their IQ points. Video Games are just today’s excuse to overlook the fact that mix-and-match families, lousy public education, and African-Americans are ruining this country. (I hope you can tell that I was kidding about the African-American comment, but I was just thinking that unless I did something quickly, I might actually write an essay that doesn’t attack anyone directly)