My Life in Video Games: Pong (1972, Atari)

Recently, I've found myself looking rather closely at the video games I play these days, and contemplating how drastically they've changed in the last thirty or forty years, and what it was that I apparently spent hours upon hours playing back in the old days. Just thinking back and comparing some of them led me to the idea of tracking my life by the video games I have played over the years. Not just any video games appearing on the timeline since my birth, mind you, but specific ones that I have special memories of, or that consumed massive amounts of hours of my childhood (and adulthood) over the years. I'm not a gaming geek or a tech head, mind you. Just somebody that grew up in the culture of electronic entertainment, and was lucky enough to be born into the era of Video Games.

I'm so lucky, in fact (if you can call it that), that I can trace the beginning of my interest in video games back to the beginning of video games themselves. Or, more precisely, My first video game was the world's first video game: Pong.
 

That's right, I'm old enough to remember Pong. And the only thing that makes me feel old more than saying "I'm old enough to remember Pong" is when I say "I'm old enough to remember Pong," and somebody old enough to drive says "What in the hell is Pong?"

I was born the year after Pong hit the shelves, and my parents, young and married freshly out of High School, owned a Pong system. I remember playing it on a small, round, silver television with built-in rabbit ears on a rotating base; it looked like a robot head, and Google refuses to find a picture of it for me, no matter combination of search criteria I enter. The system had switches that allowed to change the size of the "paddles" and, I believe, the speed of the ball. I also recall that you could switch between two or three different Pong-related games, whatever the hell those were, but for the most part that switch stayed set to Pong. The controls, which we also called paddles, and which I also can't find a picture of, were hand grips with a big wheel on top that you would twist to move their namesakes on screen. Years after the pong system was defunct, the weird dial-topped hand grips served as props for many imaginary childhood games. I guess as far as controllers go, we've come full circle with the Wii.

I'm not sure how old I was, but I was definitely very young, since the new age of video gaming was right around the corner. But I do still remember playing for hours on end, entertained simply by the notion that I was controlling what was happening on the screen. There were even Easter Eggs in Pong, so to speak; there was a certain thrill in getting the paddles to line up just right, so that the ball would bounce back and forth on its own, stuck in loop produced by the low-rent electronic duplication of physics.

English: Atari Super Pong (model C-140) - First era console of 1976. It has 4 Pong games (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The mind reels at the lack of choice involved with setting up a game. These days, you can spend hours creating characters, sometimes worlds, before settling down to business. With Pong, the only decision you need to make with your gaming partner was who would be sitting on the left or right. There weren't even colors to choose from! That's right: challenging somebody to a game of checkers involved more decisions than squaring of on a Pong tournament.

Forget the minimalist black-and-white playing fields, what about the audio? Video games today have their own soundtracks, and ambient background noises can sound like they're coming from right behind you. What did you listen to while playing Pong? Just a steady, almost metronome rhythm of electronic beeps whenever the electronic ball bounced off a paddle or the walls of your television screen. They didn't even bother trying to make it a pleasant sound, they just through in an electronic bleating that almost sounded like an alarm clock trying to wake you up one beat at a time. Maybe it's because I was still too young to appreciate a good stereo system, but never even occurred to me to listen to music when I played. Just me and some other giddily tortured soul, staring intently at moving white dots and lines for hours on end, listening to the beeps as if they were an integral part of the game.

It's almost not fair to compare Pong with today's cornucopia of ultra-realistic video games. There are a lot of things from the seventies that seem completely ridiculous now (in fairness, some of them were), especially when it comes to electronics and entertainment media. It's easy to overlook the importance of the wheel's invention when today's concerns focus on miles per gallon (highway) or fossil fuel versus green energy. Then again, kids do tend to amuse easily, so maybe I'm making too much out of it. But yeah, I rocked the paddles big-time way back then. Thus was born the first generation of Video Gamers.

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An Open Letter to Brian, Regarding the Passing of an Old Friend

Dear Brian,

We have had our differences in the past. So much so, in fact, that I find myself posting this open letter to you on my blog, as I have no doubt you have blocked my email in order to avoid any direct contact. I happen to know that you monitor my online presence, however, so I'm sure this will eventually make it to your eyes. If not... oh well. It still needs to be said.

A close mutual friend of ours passed away last week. He died young and unexpectedly, and left behind a wife and daughter. Those who knew him and cared about him were devastated.

With the service planned for the following Wednesday, I volunteered to help contact all of his old friends to see who could attend. Having known him since High School, I was able to reach out to those he had lost contact with, those with fond memories of an old friend who had tragically passed away at the age of 36. I contacted everyone I could think of that might have even indirectly known him, on the off chance that they would want to come and pay their respects.

I did not attempt to contact you.

You were one of his closest friends back in the old days - practically joined at the hip, as is proven by numerous pictures and videos the two of you took back then. Thick as thieves, some would say. But I made no attempt to contact you with the news. Not because of the animosity between us now, or out of any fear of confrontation or personal grudge. I did not attempt to contact you because, in my honest opinion, you did not deserve to know.

I was informed by some mutual friends of ours (the ones you have childishly told you can not associate with as long as they are still friends of mine), that they felt you should be informed. I disagree with their judgement, but can forgive them for the error, as they still feel some weird affection towards you, like the ghostly pains of a phantom limb. They only see what used to be there. But, their hearts were in the right place. So they informed you of our old friend's demise, and invited you to the service.

You said you were sorry to hear about his death, and that you would send a card or something, but that you would not attend the service. I predicted as much before I was told. You have spent most of your adult life isolating yourself from old friends one by one, using excuses of moral outrage and logical wariness to rationalize your disdain for exerting undue effort on behalf of anyone but yourself. But you couldn't just say you were busy, or had to work, or didn't want to travel so far. You already knew that these cop-outs would not fly, that other friends who had not seen him in years were taking time off work and traveling for hours on end to say farewell to someone they cared deeply about. So, you fell back on an old standby. You blamed me. I am much too dangerous, you explained, and you have to protect me from your family.

I did not invite you to the service because I felt you did not belong there. But you were invited anyway. And you proved me right by refusing to attend. I am not upset that you did not attend our friend's funeral. You gave up your rights to consider yourself a friend in mourning when you turned your back on him and his family, not only making up excuses to avoid visiting, but cutting off all communication with him out of some strange aversion to other people's problems, an impulse that none of your other former friends have been able to fully comprehend or explain. For someone whose family constantly rubs his old brother's successes in his face to imply his own shortcomings, you have an awful disdain for the weaknesses and faults of others.

I almost believe that our dearly departed mutual friend would agree. He had eventually caught on to your little game of Silent Treatment, and in the past years both he and his wife had expressed to me their displeasure with your attitude and judgement. But I have a feeling that, were he alive today, or if he is in someway witnessing all that has transpired since he died, that he would ultimately forgive you your transgressions and welcome you back as a friend. He was a kind person with a heart bigger than most, and a far more forgiving soul than me. To him, your presence at the service would probably have been seen as a blessing, rather than the insult that it would be.

No, I am not mad at you for not attending our friend's funeral. I'm glad you chose not to attend. You proved yourself to be as shallow and vain as I had predicted. But I take issue with you scapegoating me as the reason. Too cowardly to just say you can't be bothered to honor the memory of a childhood friend, you hide behind accusations that I am a "Dangerous" man, too wild and unpredictable to allow access to you and your family. I will admit that I am a large man, and stand strong and vindictive with my passions and beliefs, sometimes often stubbornly so (as this open letter undoubtedly proves). But you would have to travel far and wide to find those who can honestly claim they have been harmed by my hand or through my intentions. I am no Mother Theresa, but it would take a fair amount of creative enhancement of my actions and deeds to paint me as any kind of imminent threat.

Besides, what is this "family" you are so eager to protect me from? You have spent most of your adult life running away from your immediate family, rightfully eager to distance yourself from parents and siblings that have done little more than look down on you since your childhood, always treating you as an inferior and a disappointment. You've succeeded in this escape on many levels, apparently, since even your own mother doesn't have a single picture of you on her Facebook page. Plenty of your older brother and his family, but not a single one of you. She even has one of your wife, although I'm assuming that was because she liked the dress. I know this, by the way, because your mother was on our dead friend's Facebook Friends List.

If I am indeed dangerous to you, than I am a danger to your heightened self-image, and the rationalizations you use to build walls of false logic and moral superiority between yourself and others, intricate facades meant to obscure the truly selfish and emotionally lazy reasons you have for your treatment of people you somehow refer to as friends. You select and eliminate friends like a child in a schoolyard, assuming that your approval or disapproval means something about the intrinsic worth of others, that your imposed rankings and presumptuous bartering of friendship as chattel ("I can't be your friend if you are his friend.") carries an weight or substance, as if such prepubescent posturing has any place in the complicated world of adult relationships.

You turned your back on our friend as you did countless others, and always with hypocritical reasoning. You turn your back on a friend because of his less than wise personal life choices, then sink money into a house on a flood plane now worth half what you paid, at best. You reject a friend because of his educational career choices, only to drop out of NYU after a solid week because you couldn't handle it. You shun friends because they are having drug or alcohol problems, only to become a closet drinker yourself, sneaking cases of wine into your bedroom at night while your parents are asleep. You criticize friends for breaking the law and not respecting the property of others, then illegally enter your neighbor's vacant apartment on New Years Eve as a joke. You eliminate friends from your life with smug self-justification, then hold a bitter grudge when one of those friends becomes famous after forming a band he didn't invite you to join.

I guess we do still have our differences. But at least we both agreed on one thing: you didn't belong at our old friend's funeral. Too bad you had use me as an excuse. Since you weren't there, however, let me assure you that you were not missed. Get used to that.

Sincerely,

An old, former friend.


P.S. No doubt, you will react to my communication with you as you have in the past, by threatening to submit it as evidence of some sort of ever-increasing imaginary threat I pose to the safety of you and your "family." In order to facilitate the process for your local authorities, I have included below a complete list of my alleged transgressions:

*Allegedly (without any evidence or proof to support such accusations) making copies of your wife's LiveJournal posts in which she said nasty things about her in-laws, and then mailing those unfortunate public statements to your parents via the postal service.

[I must point out that this event took place before our mutual falling out, after which I was suddenly blamed. Before our falling out, all accusations regarding the mysterious LiveJournal Copies were directed (also without evidence) at your former upstairs neighbor in the house rented to you by your parents, whose apartment I witnessed you enter illegally on several occasions.]

*Calling you two days after the birth of our dead friend's daughter to chastise you for not calling to congratulate him, and then erupting into a fifteen-minute rant in which I said many ugly, nasty, horrible things about you and your wife.

[Guilty as charged, as the audience of coworkers who giggled uncontrollably while watching me will readily contest to.]

*Inviting you and/or your spouse to a dozen or so online social networks over a one-year period, including MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and several others that are most likely defunct by now.

[Feel free to attach your itemized, dated list of these invites, which you sent me once as proof of my "harassment" of you. I'm assuming I'm not the only person on the list of unwanted invites, however, since even your mother doesn't have you as one of her Facebook Friends.]

*Writing a short parody of the Saw film franchise as a Pledge commercial, in which I inadvertently gave a character the same name as your wife.

[An honest coincidence, which I attempted to correct by immediately changing the name of the character. Later, realizing how stupid the accusation was, as there was no similarities whatsoever between your wife and the character beyond the name, I went back and restored the original name of the character in the piece, which can still be read here.] 

Add this open letter condemning you for your cowardly and selfish actions in regards to an old friend's passing to the list, and I think that brings us up to date. Wow, I really am dangerous, aren't I?

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Fat Kids Get Bullied More? Really?

Cover of Lord of the Flies, Educational Edition

I try not to bitch and moan too much about useless tests and surveys that are performed in the name of science or knowledge and then later highlighted as transitional filler during the cable news hour-long cycle. Harping on why scientists would study cricket orgasms or the eating habits of nuns (does that count as a pun?) gets old quick, and more importantly, "useless" studies singled out by politicians usually end up having legitimate scientific implications. It's a waste of time that doesn't seem worth the effort.

But of course, I had to turn on MSNBC today at the exact moment they ran a quick news item about a recent study that has shown that obese children get picked on more than children of average weight.

Holy shit. Really? Are they sure about this? I mean, maybe we should get a couple more years of research under our belts before jumping to any harsh conclusions. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that Dr. Julie C. Lumeng from the University of Michigan led the study thoroughly and without cutting corners. But I'm going to need some pretty well document case study reports to convince me that overweight children are picked on more. The whole idea sounds more than a little suspect to me.

In case you missed it, the previous paragraph was more than a tad sarcastic.

Of course fat kids get picked on more. Nobody likes a fat kid, and everyone knows it. You couldn't come up with a better example of common knowledge if you tried. Unless you managed to grow up without being exposed to any kind of unsupervised social interaction with other children, you aren't even going to attempt to deny it. Fat kids are catnip to bullies, so much so that even non-bullies feel compelled to mess with the fat kids. Its just some perverse extension of human nature that will never be eliminated. Remember Piggy from Lord of the Flies? Yeah, of course you do. Everyone who reads above a third-grade level does. Piggy was the fat kid, and what happened to him? That's right; his classmates crushed him to death with a giant rock. And you know how many English students in middle or high school read that chapter and found it to be outrageous, unrealistic, or even a tad unusual? None of them. Not even the fat ones.

But I'm not annoyed that someone felt the need to devote time and energy into proving empirically that fat kids get bullied and abused more than skinny ones. I'm not even upset that they felt the need to publish the results in some bizarre attempt to further educate the world about this previously unrecognized bias against chubby kids. Not at all.

What pisses me off to no end, however, is that the continual and unrelenting joke that is the American News Media somehow felt that this startling revelation was newsworthy enough to not only publish as if it were an actual news story, but to highlight with other breaking news items during the course of a normal news cycle. Not only do they care so little about delivering real news that they'll waste time with this useless nonsense, but they think so little of the average viewer that they seem convinced they are stupid enough to actually consider this a real news story.

The sad part is, they're probably right. About the stupid American audience, I mean. Then again, they're also right about obese children being bullied more. Just ask a fat kid, they'll tell you.

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Itawamba High School, Educating the Bigots of Tomorrow

Image via Wikipedia

That sounds a bit harsh, I suppose. After all, where do I get off accusing an entire school of being ignorant, backwards, redneck, homophobic redneck bigots? Seems kind of cruel, doesn't it?

Indeed, let's talk about cruel.

If you watch or read the news with any regularity, you've probably heard about the struggles of young teenage lesbian Constance McMillen, who has been jumping through legal hoops in order to take her date to the Itawamba High School prom. Usually not a big deal. But it suddenly becomes a big deal when your prom date is of the same sex, and school you attend is populated by uptight judgmental tools abiding by a morality system half a century out of date.

First, they told Constance that she would not be allowed to attend the Itawamba High School prom with her girlfriend. Constance rightly deduced that she was being unfairly discriminated against, and with the help of the ACLU got the courts to force the school to allow her to attend the prom. Not to be outdone, Itawamba High School cancelled the prom, insisting that it was being cancelled for a completely unrelated and unspecified reason. Constance, the ACLU and the courts saw through this clever ruse, however, and promptly ordered them to hold a prom.

So, what did the proud members of Itawamba High School, which laughingly includes the word "empowerment" in its Mission Statement, finally decide to do? Begrudgingly accepting the court decision and take a reluctant step into the dawn of acceptance and tolerance would have been way way to handle the decision. Instead, Itawamba High School decided to adhere to playground rules and hold a secret prom.

Just to be clear, this is not an exaggeration or embellishment for dramatic effect. A "fake prom" was held at a Fulton, Mississippi Country Club, to which only seven students were directed to: Constance and her date and five other students, two of which were students with learning difficulties. The rest of the students were apparently directed to a "secret prom," or as I like to call it, a No Gays Prom, at an undisclosed location.

Now, there is no shock when it comes to teenagers acting cruelly or maliciously, or using exclusionary tactics to embarrass or degrade others. Kids are kids, and there will always be those who seek to feel better about themselves by publicly ostracizing or excluding other kids for any reason available that marks them as being "different." If this was just the students, then this sort of behavior, while still unacceptable, would be sadly expected.

But this isn't just about the kids. These are the parents of teenagers, active in the community, no doubt with direct ties to the school board, that actively coordinated the creation of two separate proms: one for "our kids," and on for gays, mentally handicapped, and any other unwanted students.

It goes even wider than that: there can be no doubt that the faculty of Itawamba High School knew about these arrangements, and that word spread to at least some of the residents of Fulton, Mississippi that the grandest display of juvenile exclusionary backstabbing was about to take place. Yet no one saw the need to inform Constance, her parents, or the media closely monitoring the whole scenario that something foul, disgusting, and downright immature was about to take place. Indeed, it seems that the kind of petty isolationist attitude you would expect at a twelve-year-old's birthday party was fully supported by any and every so-called responsible adult that knew about it.

Any rational human being (i.e., not someone from Itawamba High School) might be tempted to feel sorry for Constance, just imagining the emotional impact of having the entire student body, as well as the staff and faculty of Itawamba High School, and a good portion of the town of Fulton, Mississippi tell you that you are unwelcome by inviting you to a fake prom. But there is no pity to be had here, for Constance truly comes out as the victor in this scenario. She not only successfully stood up to institutionalized discrimination and bigotry, she forced the bitter, hateful people of Itawamba High School to show their true faces while simultaneously hiding from public view.

All it takes is a brief trip to the Photos section of the Itawamba High School Website to see the true display of cowardice; the blank page where the Prom 2010 Photos should be is blank, as the school apparently doesn't feel the need to post pictures from either the Fake Prom or the No Gays Prom. There is also no email address listed on their Contact page, only a physical mailing address, although whether this was the case before the No Gays Prom is unknown to me. Their omission reveals their acknowledgement of their complicity, that a whole nation of rational human beings would hold these smiling pictures of happy students and proud parent chaperons, and rightfully declare every smiling face the face of ignorance and prejudice.

I hope colleges across the country are taking note of Itawamba High School's graduating class. I think any institution of higher learning would want to take into consideration a potential college student's involvement in a vast conspiracy to publicly shun and segregate a fellow student based solely on her sexual orientation. Always looks good on a job resume, too. 

Constance is already far wiser than most of the jackasses currently attending her school and teaching her classes. When asked about the fact that two students with learning disabilities were also directed to the Fake Prom, she said "They had the time of their lives. That's the one good thing that come out of this, they didn't have to worry about people making fun of them." It's a sad but intuitive realization for a young girl to have, that sometimes it is better to be excluded than to be mocked and ridiculed by ignorant and immature people full of little more than hate and uncompromising intolerance. Especially when that level of ignorance and immaturity is being displayed by a majority of your town's parents and educational professionals.

Itawamba High School, Home of Intolerance and Bigotry. Now there's a Diploma worthy of framing.

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