Game Off

Game on at ACMI finishes up this week, and sadly I didn't get to make another visit beyond attending the opening. Those of you who know me, know that this past 5 or 6 months haven't exactly been the most delightful, and so while I'm saddened not to have made it, I think that I'm ok with other things taking priority.

Way back before Game On opened, me and another friend of mine were talking about starting a games related blog because we thought that the critical writing about video games in Australia was seriously lacking. That all fell through because, well, for a whole host of reasons, but with the introduction of this blog, I wanted to write one of the posts originally intended for that one.

Here it is, 5 months later, and perhaps with added insight....

I have a sadly fragmented memory of childhood, and one of my long-standing personal issues is that I lack strong positive memories of growing up. It's filled with arguments and shouting and fighting and struggling for some sort of identity within boundaries that were unclear and enforced at random intervals with unpredictable ferocity. As a result, or perhaps because of nature rather than nurture, I tended towards the insular as a child, preferring books or computers or some solitary thing instead of being outside kicking a football against a wall as I was so frequently ordered to do.

As a family, like all families do, we used to go on holidays. Long car journeys with infrequent stops and more arguments and more fighting and the final destination of a caravan site where we'd spend the following 2 weeks desperately trying to fill the time...

Like much of my childhood, the memories of those collections of two week periods aren't exactly positive. This is something I'd been thinking about a lot at the turn of this year, prompted no doubt by the coming upheaval and the bubbling tensions between me and my family that had just found their way to the surface again.

Amidst all this, I scored tickets for the opening of Game On.

And there, in the exhibition space of ACMI, I found something positive from my childhood.

They had a sit-down Star Wars arcade game. Faded black and blue paint. Green and red vector lines. A loose controller with slightly spongey buttons. A really, really, really, uncomfortable seat.

And an escape from all of the stuff that was going on when I was much younger.

I remember going to the arcades either inside or near the caravan parks and changing the meager money I was allowed to spend on the games and playing Star Wars or the inferior isometric Return of the Jedi or Operation Wolf or any of the other, less appealing games without special controllers or guns or sit-in cabinets, only wobbly joysticks and broken off buttons. I remember that those games were the highlights of my day, and of the weeks, and of the holidays.

Those games are the positive memories I have of my childhood.

And they were brought back by just seeing that old, faded, battered, but still working, Star Wars cabinet.

When I first bandied the idea for this post around, months and months ago, I was thinking about the games as art debate which kicks around and always seems sort of foolish to me, so I won't get into it, but what I was thinking was that, even if games weren't art, who cares. Isn't escapism enough? Isn't the fact that they've made somebody's life better enough? Aspiring for high art is great, but it isn't only high art that can affect someone, that sends them on a new path through life, or that helps them get through whatever it is that they need to get through.

I'm sure the people who made the Star Wars game were just trying to entertain, but I'm glad they managed to do something more than that.