Where have all the good video games gone?

This past weekend I was in a bar and had the opportunity to play a few games of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga. The experience reminded me of how much I used to enjoy video games, and how much they’ve changed.

Back in the ‘80s, I was just another dorky kid with an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and piles of cartridges and floppy disks stuffed with games. As a dorky teen, I graduated to playing classic stand-up arcade games like Star Wars, Dragon’s Lair, Asteroids and Satan’s Hollow.

I can’t remember a single Atari game that required killing other people. Even in the somewhat violent Dragon’s Lair, Dirk just kills weird-looking monsters, ghosts and goblins. Death and violence experienced by sprite characters like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong was often depicted with a short animation of them spinning around or melting in place, accompanied by cute little “you’ve lost a ‘life’” sound.

I finally weaned myself off video games after my largely horrible first year of college, when I discovered there was more to life than sitting in front of a glowing screen and striving toward false accomplishments for little reward (...which I’d pick up again later when I got my first real job).

I didn’t have a close encounter with a video game until I was about 26. I vividly remember the experience of watching some younger, college-age friends play Mortal Kombat on their home game system, and being quite intimidated. Opponents were ripping each other’s heads off and throwing them at each other, pixelated blood spewing forth from severed limbs and torsos. Someone handed me the “joystick,” or “game controller,” as it was called now, and I was completely confused by all the buttons, which seemed to require a pilot’s license to operate.

Fast forward a few years later as I watch another friend shooting, bitch-slapping and running over pedestrians, cops and any other number of innocent, law-abiding citizens as part of Grand Theft Auto. At one point I was rather shocked to see that killing “hos” rewarded the player with points. I recalled that time when video games were more innocent and innocuous, and asked my friend how he felt about all this simulated death and violence as the father of a young child--a child who would likely be exposed to these games. Without looking away from the screen, he said he was an adult, and he was the one making the choice to play the game; it’s not something he’d expose his child to. I’m paraphrasing here because I couldn’t quite hear him over the hyper-realistic screams of an old woman getting run over by his game avatar’s sports car.

I know not every game out there is horribly violent, but most of them seem to feature human-on-human violence and the glamorization of thug life or base, mob-fueled criminality. With today’s game systems’ powerful processors and huge memories, the games themselves have long, complicated and, quick frankly--rather boring and hackneyed “storylines.” They seem to take weeks to master and months to “solve,” if that’s even possible.

All in all, I miss the innocence and benign simplicity of games like Ms. Pac-Man, where the characters fell in love, died a dignified death, and whose main mission over the span of their three glorious lives was to gobble up as many dots as possible, evade brightly-colored cartoon ghosts, and move on to the next level before their three lives were up.