My Father’s Philosophy Of Gaming

I’ve mentioned Dad on this blog before, in particular his devotion to Space Invaders on the BBC Micro. Given that Space Invaders was the gateway to video gaming as we know it – the primal Ur-Game that launched a medium – surely he went on to play game after game on the mighty machine he had brought into the house?

Sadly, no. Come with me for an exploration of the Asperger’s of gaming.

Having played Space Invaders and loved it, Dad proceeded to play – Space Invaders. With a zen-like focus, unlocking newer and more devious strategies to combat the left-to-right-and-then-right-to-left menace. He never really got that interested in other games, until the Atari ST came along, and he discovered Robotz.

Robotz – an emulated version of which I gave him for his birthday a couple of days ago – was very similar to Bezerk, in that you had an army of robots (or robotz as they were known) whose touch killed, and electrified walls that also killed. Essentially, you had to blow up the generator that powered the beasts before your bullets could kill them, and even then they’d take two or three shots. So there was an element of strategy – more so than for Space Invaders, in fact.

Suddenly, it was all Robotz, all the time. New strategies were formulated and discussed at length. Hours at a time would be spent learning to work the battered old joystick with ever-increasing precision as the years rolled by – until suddenly we had a PC in the house.

Minesweeper had arrived.

Dad’s gaming history ends here. While he accepted his present of Robotz with deep joy and gratitude, I have no doubt that the maze of deadly machines will always be second best compared to the pure hyper-strategy of Minesweeper.

Dad’s philosophy breaks down into two theories of gaming – Theory One: the simpler a game is, and the more it works the brain like a hefty bag, the gooder it is. Space Invaders was about as straightforward as it got, but Robotz reduced the numbers of enemies while ramping up the mental difficulty level. In turn, Robotz was replaced by Minesweeper – the ultimate in simplicity, and requiring you to make the kind of tough number-based choices you only get from a Sudoku puzzle these days. (Dad plays a lot of Sudoku.)

Theory Two: If a game is good, why play a different one?

We’re in a world where you need to buy a new graphics card and a shedload of memory every time a new game comes out, and even then you’ll probably bring it home from the shop and watch it fart across your screen like a massive turd as it desperately battles your rubbish hardware. And then you play through it for a few days and it’s over and you have to buy another one. Whoops! You don’t have enough RAM to buy another one! Better take eighty quid down to the ol’ computer store, Pilgrim, and don’t forget another £80 for the game too.

While you do that, content yourself in the knowledge that my Dad is getting inordinate amounts of pleasure from Windows Minesweeper and a game put out on a coverdisk in the early nineties. Let’s face it – my father’s philosophy of gaming is undoubtedly the correct one.

It’s still a bit odd, mind.