Digital Age

No, that headline is not a prescription for your weekend in Las Vegas. It’s what happens tovideo games over time. There was once a time when you could not get any more hardcore than a game of Pac Man.And then Ms. Pac Man came along and amped the whole Pac Man formula up to 11. It was insane! It wasfast! More than a few gamers gladly blew their salaries supporting a debilitating Power Pellet addiction. It was aboutas hardcore as hardcore gets.

Pac Man today has been tossed into the “Retro” bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boringand ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa’s Ran crap because it’s 20 years old, or write off allblack-and-white movies because they lack “realistic” coloration, right?

There’s still hope.

Most of us who grew up with classic arcade titles are now in our 30s and are—despite the best advice of those whoknow better—having children. We owe it to our kids to make sure that they do not evaluate games in a vacuum, toeducate them on why the classics are classics so that they don’t arrive at Joystiq 10 years from now send us hate maillike this: “for JS to say [Geometry Wars] is their fav is a slap in the face to 360 buyers. Pd0 is 100 times betterplaying online then this silly game. And so is just about every other 360 launch title.”

I forgive the kid, because today’s teens grew up in a cultural vacuum. Their parents are generally too old to havegrown up with Atari and Nintendo and therefore failed to pass on any understanding of what makes a good game a goodgame. These kids have failed to inherit cultural or critical literacy. Just as school children must readDickens, Hemingway and Salinger as part of a proper education, so too should a proper diet of game classics be requiredplaying. During summer breaks and by force, if necessary.