Playing Games (Cecilia Peartree)

This post was inspired by the discovery that there’s an apparently endless supply of videos on YouTube which focus on a number of players fighting each other and various enemies on Minecraft (don’t ask me how I know this).

Before I watched some of the Minecraft videos, I was tempted to write about the great Kit-Kat heist,  with the illustration below. 

Glad to have my Kit Kat stash at the moment

I had a difficult history with computer games even before Minecraft. That history, I’ve just worked out, goes back around fifty years, which was when some of my work colleagues discovered they could access a game I think was called ‘Space Wars’ on the mainframe computer at our place of work. Once the senior staff found out about it, they ruled that it wasn’t to be played during working hours but playing after hours was all right. This was a workplace that had very few other rules even compared with others of the time. I never quite understood the attraction of Space Wars, if that was really its name, but this was just the first game I didn’t understand – there were many more to follow.

After that I had a break from not understanding games, or computers for that matter, until we had a ZX Spectrum at home, and it opened up a whole new world of misunderstandings. However, as a former programmer I liked to demonstrate to my sons that I wasn’t completely out of the loop with computers, so I did try from time to time. My favourite game (using the word ‘favourite’ loosely) was ‘Lemmings’, because I approved of the purpose of the game, which wasn’t to blast or outrun every creature that appeared on the screen, but to rescue lemmings from themselves by guiding them away from danger if possible. This storyline made it a lot more interesting, and I think I got as far as level 10 on occasion before getting bored.

It must have been about then that my sons and I decided to enter a game of our own creation into a coding competition run by one of the games companies, and we invented a game called ‘Clans’. It was actually quite an educational project, if nothing else. We collaborated on the game design, storyboard and music, and we put it all together and succeeded in submitting it, though not in winning. I suppose in a way I sort of advised on the historical aspects, since it was set in the days when there were frequent fights among the clans, and it might even have been based loosely on real events, though I can’t remember what they were.

The next computer we had was a weirdly combined PC and Mega Drive, and I found I quite liked Sonic the Hedgehog, which was good for unwinding after a day at work (managing databases), though I never really got to know the characters as my sons did. This became a recurring theme, in fact. They would immerse themselves in the characters and stories behind the games, and I suppose if I had managed to learn a bit more about these, I might have appreciated the games themselves more. Something I did notice was that my younger son, who hadn’t been as quick to start reading as the older one, suddenly wanted to be able to read the instructions on computer games and that led him to reading actual books – and eventually to an English degree, though that took a lot longer.

After that I had quite a long break from playing any computer games, apart from variations on Scrabble and ‘3 in a row’, but circumstances have brought me back to them in the last couple of years. I am not a complete technophobe, so I quite enjoy a game of Lego City, despite the tendency of my opponent to want to run me over at regular intervals, sometimes with a train.

And so to the Minecraft videos. Because of having to watch some of these, I began to think again about Minecraft itself. I try not to think about it if at all possible, since my early attempts to play the game have been disastrous. I don’t seem to be able to retain any information about which buttons to press on the Nintendo controller for a start, so I’m beginning again every time I play, and then even if I do manage to press the right button by some fluke, I don’t really understand the point of the game so sometimes I will dig frantically or chop down trees and then not know what to do with them, or spend half an hour trying to get one block of something – is it wood, or earth, or ice, or what? – on top of another one. I think on my last attempt I couldn’t even turn to look in the right direction to see the other player I was meant to be playing with, or against.

Watching the videos of experts playing, not only were things moving so fast in them that I couldn’t understand anything of what was going on, but I couldn’t cope with the visual backgrounds of lurid, clashing blocks of colour. I began to wonder what sort of art people who grew up with this would produce, though some might say it wouldn’t be any weirder than that created by some artists from the pre-computer-game generation.

Luckily we also watched some non-Minecraft videos that day too. ‘Building Forts for Cats’ was one of my personal favourites, though ‘I Built a Roller-Coaster in my Front Room’ is a bit more exciting.

Best wishes for Easter