I made a Twitter joke yesterday, which doubled as a Facebook joke, which then, given the nature of human beings and humor and, I guess, some sort of cold diffusion theory, lost its jokiness. It happens.
There’s nothing like a little exegesis to take the fun out of jokes, but here it is: My son was looking over my shoulder as I logged on to my computer, remarked that I obviously had a long and complicated password, and I thought, huh. Most of us use passwords and PINs every day, but when I was a kid passwords were for secret agents. It would never have occurred to me that I’d grow up to live in a world of encryption, or that it would all be so mundane. No spies here.
This Future World is still cool, though. From where I sit, I can see and name a dozen impossible things, at least from the standpoint of a kid in, say, 1966. A wireless router. A DVR. A cell phone. A mouse. A remote control. Lots and lots of lights.
None of this is news to you, although sometimes I get interested in technology slopes. It’s said by people who study this sort of thing that facility with personal computing drops off drastically, generationally, at right about my age; not much older than 50, then, and bloggers, YouTube uploaders, amateur programmers, etc., start to decrease substantially. This makes sense given the explosion of technology; you were either riding the wave from the beginning, probably related to work, or else you spent the rest of the time just trying to catch up.
This is how I feel about video games. There are plenty of Atari-bred 40-somethings out there who caught the wave; I never did, and I gave up trying long ago.
I bought my daughter a GameBoy 20 years ago, for Christmas. Not long after, I brought home our first Nintendo system, and I was a big user. Those were long days, early business-owning days, and I relaxed for a while in the evenings by trying to save the princess.
It zoomed past, though, and I flapped my arms for a bit and then surrendered. Too complicated, too much. I became an observer only, catching bits and pieces as I walked through the room, trying not to become an epileptic. Yikes.
So it was weird yesterday to walk into a game store by myself, to buy something for myself. Beyond weird. Bordering on alarming, maybe.
But, y’know. Sometimes boys just want to have fun. Even old boys.
I began to back out of the room slowly with Nintendo 64, a huge technological leap in 1996, quadrupling the processor instead of the typical doubling. Even Mario 64, which had the princess and the plumber, was too much for me. Way too many buttons, views, worlds, moves. Go, young people, leave me and save yourselves. This is the way of the world.
Except. Except.
There was an N64 game called PilotWings. A pretty simple game. A flying game in a cartoon world, and I loved it. I didn’t have to jump on no bosses; I could just hang glide around an island, listen to music, and feel an imaginary EEG flatline out. It calmed me down.
I’ve grieved over PilotWings for years now, our N64 system long traded in for something fancier. And no matter how hard John tried to pique my game interest back up, no matter how many classic games he found for the Wii or the GameCube or the 360, I just wanted to fly. Not a 747. Not a Cessna. Just a little gyrocopter.
And now I have it again. I just downloaded an emulator and a ROM — these words are strange, they frighten me Mister – and I could glide around my island again. Although it was sort of awkward with a keyboard. So I went to the game store and bought a PC controller. Now I’m good.
Either you know, or you don’t.
I am serene now, always a good fit for me. There’s plenty to do around here, way more than I have time for, but I can spare a few minutes here and there for PilotWings, as strange as it feels, because it also feels…good.
And last night, Julie came in to show me something, a picture, an article, something interesting and relevant and topical and worthwhile, and then she stopped.
“Oh,” she said, understanding. “You’re flying,” and I was, too.
