From Space Invaders to Doom
Doom was a terrible game. The graphics were awful, the zombies were particularly disgusting, and when you finally managed to hit one of them in the heart, instead of blood, huge red pixels spurted out. The game’s only redeeming quality was that it worked as a decent stress reliever. After all, picking up giant weapons and blowing zombie heads off during adolescence is a basic need, like vitamin C, water, or cigarettes.
Now an Australian company has developed a computer that uses live human neurons instead of chips. They took some neurons, made them play Pong first, and then had them play Doom. No surprise there: the scientists concluded that they played horribly, although that hardly matters for the experiment, whose objective is to prove that cells can learn tasks in real time.
The first video game I played as a child was Space Invaders. There was no computer at home. The only computer in the family, incredibly enough, was at my grandmother’s house, because for several years she gave private typing and computer lessons. So on weekends my siblings and I would go to my grandmother’s to eat cake and play Space Invaders at first, and shortly afterward Pac-Man, which, along with Tetris, is surely the reason why my generation experienced the greatest increase in demand for anti-anxiety medication in the history of humankind.
All this came back to mind because of the Doom experiment … these guys thought it was a good idea to teach them how to decapitate zombies.
Years later my father bought a computer for the house because, as an economist, auditor, and accounting adviser, he needed a device to manage his clients’ accounts. Since I wasn’t allowed to install video games, my first “video game” on that computer was Paint, where I drew horrible things that I believed were artistic. Next I moved on to an ancient word processor, where I wrote little books that I illustrated myself with drawings made in ASCII code.
A few months ago my father found a folder with some of those stories I wrote. It should have been exciting to come across things I had written when I was seven, when I had no idea that I would spend my entire life writing. But it was also rather embarrassing. I thought about the world war my enemies could wage against me with that jumble of syntax errors and those millions of spelling mistakes per line, and I suggested to my father that we burn it all in the fireplace. But he assured me he would keep it safe and that it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands … unless they paid him enough.
After a long struggle, in the mid-1990s I finally convinced my father to let me install some games on his fabulous home computer. With Italy 1990, about the World Cup, things finally got really fun, although the players looked like cockroaches running around on a green soup of pixels. Shortly afterward I played a basketball game for an entire summer, which is strange because I have never been particularly drawn to that sport. And I was forbidden from playing a cycling game because each pedal stroke, right or left, required pressing a different key, so to win the race you had to turn your two index fingers into a machine gun against the keyboard, resulting in a dislodged key for every victory.
The first graphic adventure I truly enjoyed for many hours was one from the Indiana Jones series. Perhaps because by then we had a somewhat better computer. For the first time the graphics didn’t feel like a cruel joke, and while playing you could travel to Venice, which looked absolutely beautiful, travel around the world, enter libraries, and talk to people while searching for clues.
I also had fun with one called Prince of Persia, from 1989, which I’m not sure today’s fanatical ayatollahs would appreciate. Unlike most public officials in my country, when Windows became popular I never wasted my time playing Minesweeper — I’ve never understood what it’s about — or cards, much less talking to the despotic idiot in the help clip invented by Bill Gates.
In the mid-1990s a Spanish company invented my favorite game. It was called PC Fútbol, and it was a football simulator that included everything else: transfers and sales, expense control, stadium advertising deals, specific training management, and much more. Year after year, the happiest day was the one when the new version of the game was announced. Incomprehensibly and tragically, the company went bankrupt around the turn of the century, and since then we have been a legion of orphans of the video game that kept a whole legion of Spaniards awake at night.
Afterward a bunch of simulators came along, including EA Sports’ FIFA, with much better graphics, but they never managed to capture the thrill of feeling that you were every character in the club at once: from the team president to the last substitute.
All this came back to mind because of the Doom experiment, and I still think that, of all the beautiful and educational video games we could use to train neurons grown in captivity, these guys thought it was a good idea to teach them how to decapitate zombies. Man is beyond redemption. I’m going to make a terribly sexist comment, but a woman would never have done something like that.
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