On reflection, I believe I’m enjoying my second childhood a lot more than I did my first. For one thing, there’s no bully waiting in the schoolyard to beat the tar out of me before I burst into the classroom. For another, there aren’t as many monsters lurking in the dark areas of my bedroom as there used to be.
But most importantly, there are computer hockey games now and there weren’t any then.
Where I once had to strap on skates, clear a patch of roughly frozen ice off a field behind the house and wait for a few neighbourhood buddies to show up for a hockey game, I can now flop horizontally on a comfortable couch in my cozy basement and with small plastic controller in hand, direct the passing and shooting of a whole team of little hockey players on my colour TV screen. I get no pucks shot dead on an unprotected knee or any other place and I never trip on a small clump of plowed ground sticking up through the ice and impale myself on my stick. No one leaves the ice crying in a dispute over whether or not a puck went in and nobody tells on anybody else.
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In fact, there doesn’t even have to be anybody else. I can lay flatter than Lenin’s corpse from morning till night, bowl of popcorn by my side, and play hockey for hours without ever encountering another human being. I play against, THE MACHINE. If I happen to be in a sociable mood, I can play against another human but when THE MACHINE wins, it never rubs it in for days afterwards.
At times, it does strike me as odd that an adult human being should be engaged in nerve-shattering, mortal combat with little configurations of electrons on a big, cathode-ray tube and that he’d also scream with Olympic zeal whenever he manages to manoeuvre that little glob of puck electrons past that bigger blob of goalie electrons to score a point.
But hey, this is the ’90s and I’m just trying to be a ’90s guy. TV is king.
And although home computer games are a couch potato’s dream come true, it is a bit unsettling to know that inside a little plastic “game” the size of a cigarette package, there is a mechanical brain smart enough to direct its player to elbow my player out of the way in the corner, bring the puck out front, pass it to a teammate and blast it past my goalie. How did a machine know how to do that? Could it be possible it’s brain is bigger than …
Nah!
But the real downside of all this, for me, is the trip to the video store to rent more games to feed THE MACHINE. At 43, it’s a little undignified to be pushing, shoving and grappling with other video-crazed youngsters, some a quarter my age and a third my size, to see who can get the last copy of Cal Ripken’s Baseball.
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Even more dispiriting are the games I occasionally play against people who have better eye-to-hand co-ordination in their first childhood, than I have in my second. Such a match-up took place recently when a friend’s six-year-old boy cleaned my timeclock in the first two video hockey games he ever played.
“Daddy, I beat Jim!” he proudly told his father, whose response indicated this was not something his son necessarily deserved a gilded plaque for.
“I let him win,” I gallantly tried to confess. This defeat, accompanied by other dubious losses, including daily trouncings at the “hands” of THE MACHINE, have me a bit wistful now for that patch of ice behind the house. At least in those days, a guy had a fighting chance against your average six-year-old.
©1994 Jim Hagarty
