© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 136
There isn’t all that much going through my mind at the moment. I seem to have burned off all the intellectual capacity, that I hoard for myself, in the course of the week. I don’t have anything deep, or even wittily superficial in my head. So I’m going to take the easy way out and write about my eighth favourite topic, computer games.
In the absence of a brain for the last few days, at least for personal use, I have spent my spare moments with that all-time, original classic, Doom 2. And for those of you who know a bit about the game, I have been playing the Plutonia maps: all action, no thought. It’s about the third or fourth time that I have played the map, so there isn’t much adrenalin involved. I just virtually run around and shoot things while my brain steps out to get a bit of fresh air and recharge its batteries.
If you don’t enjoy playing, or you haven’t got a clue about Doom, a movie adaptation has been made, and is probably now lurking around the less reputable shelves in video stores. It deserves to be relegated: it’s not a good movie, it’s just a cheap imitation of the game. Still, it gives an idea of the visual effect.
For those of you who disapprove, playing computer games has been shown to improve eye-hand coordination and, as the silver gamers age, to prevent Parkinsons. For those of you who don’t know what silver gamers are, they are adult people like me, who also play games, just older.
So before you open your mouth and make some statement about columnists who ought to know better than playing immature games, learn from the example of your elders and rush out and buy yourself a Playstation for the sake of your health. Remember that you may just end up clumsy with Parkinsons if you don’t. Plus you’ll be able understand why the kids get so worked up whenever computer games enter the conversation.
In some regards I am still a kid, or at least am still trying to find excitement and magic. Rugby, cricket and football don’t do it for me, but you will still find me scrutinising the back of Lego boxes in supermarkets. I still make a point of trying to see the big matinee releases in the cinema. And you will find me in the comics section from time to time, although the selection is alarmingly sparse and hardly representative of what is happening in more civilised bookshops in other parts of the world.
Hanging onto that one small, surviving part of my original humanity, the one that was there when I was growing up, has become very important to me, as I head out into the deeper waters of responsibility.
There are people out there who have destroyed their sense of fun. Some of them killed it as children to gain approval and responsibility from their elders. Others had it removed from them by brutal adults. And yet others submerged it for the sake of necessity. They are not people who smile all that often, or laugh. I meet them from time to time, and wonder where they find their happiness and what moves them to get out of bed every day?
And it is these very people, more often than not, who try the hardest to exert control and keep the systems that they have constructed inviolate. Perhaps it’s a different form of fulfilment, one I am not accustomed to. But it is not me.
The point is this: magic, excitement, enthusiasm and adventure start small but grow. As long as you can hold onto those special moments, there will always be something good round the corner, even if it is just the brief thrill of a Cyberdemon and a frantic burst of imaginary gunfire in some pixelated game from the mid-Nineties.
That thrill, if looked after, can spread to other areas of life. And perhaps that is why the older silver aged gamers are not so susceptible to Parkinsons. They have something to move them, to get the serotonin flowing and synapses flowing.
It’s not vitamins and health regimes that keep people young: it is the intense desire to find joy and excitement in everything around us.
