March 10th, 2010

I read an interesting piece on Facebook by a man named Barry Scott Will, or "PapaGamer" as he is known to his fans and readers. I first learned about him during my Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Obsession period of 2006 to ... well, to present, I suppose (it'll end when Elder Scrolls V comes out). After traipsing through the land of Cyrodill for a while, I started to apply a science to my questing by getting a guide to the game and following it comprehensively. He wrote the best one I could find, so I downloaded a text version of it and completed every quest, explored pretty much every area, and did so while enjoying the occasional dry wit of Will's writing and his meticulous coverage of the game. I was so impressed, in fact, that just recently I finally went and bought the deluxe PDF version off his website. Even though I'd already exhaustively followed it from start to finish, I just wanted the colour version with nice pictures and easier online navigation. Plus, I kind of felt he deserved the $5.00 he was asking for the guide—I'd certainly got my money's worth out of it.

While on his website I found links to his page on Facebook. And so I took a look at it and discovered the article I mentioned above. It's called "The Aging Gamer" and, unsurprisingly, discusses the age of gamers today. I was pleased to see that Will and I are the same age. Now I don't feel quite so silly talking about BioShock 2 with a 19-year-old friend of mine. Not that he cared, but a 20-something member of my team at work expressed a lot of surprise when I told him that I bought a new gaming laptop so I could get the most out of my new games, BioShock 2, Far Cry 2, etc. (Being 42 also has the advantage of having a disposable income large enough to absorb more-or-less impulse purchases like new laptops; no financing or saving up for me, heh heh heh ...)

But why such surprise from him? Computer games are not the exclusive realm of the teenaged or 20-nothing crowd. As Will says, "I've been playing video games since I first fired up Missile Command on my Atari 2600."

That's the point, I think: We 40-somethings were teenagers right around the time computers started moving into our living rooms and basements. Ours may have been the last generation to grow up before computers were as common as televisions, but we were young enough to be able to adopt them wholesale and make them second nature. Our path into computerland was limited, though: No Internet, even BBSs were still a few years off, applications to help with "homework" or "school" were too clunky to be practical (though their existence was the argument I made with my parents for getting a VIC 20!) and so the only social aspect I shared with my friends over computers was gaming. As a teenager I had the time to sit for hours in front of an Infocom game or Jumpman, Impossible Mission, M.U.L.E., etc. And so computers became a part of my life. My friends came over, we traded insults and crystite in equal measure.

Now, this is not to say that I spent my entire teen years playing computer games; in fact, I learned to program first in BASIC, then later in 6502 assembler. Later still, in my twenties I learned newer and greater languages (VB, C, C++, etc.) until I gave it all up for technical communications, but I doubt that I'd have the computer "literacy" (I actually hate that term) or the career I am in now without the games that eased me into an acceptance of computers back in my teen years. Just as Star Wars made us accepting of science and technology in general, computers in our basements gave us an avenue into accepting the digital communication paradigm—even if we were just working on topping our Night Mission high score.

We 40-somethings have an interesting relationship to computers and, in particular, the processes and backbones that today's Internet relies on. I consider us the Infrastructure Generation. Mostly through trial-and-error, but also through flashes of insight and some planning, ours is the generation that created the infrastructure of application development—engineering, testing, documentation practices, as well as the communication protocols and processes of the Internet 1.0 that made Web 2.0 applications like Facebook, Twitter, blogging, YouTube, etc. possible. Much of the framework of communications we rely on today was grown and nurtured by our generation, just as the hardware and development infrastructure was pioneered by the generation before us.

It's impossible to credit pure intellectual pursuits as the sole progenitor of the Infrastructure Generation. Now, we may sometimes frown on the frivolous nature of what the Internet is used for; tweeting the number of shots of rum you just pounded back is certainly not a high-brow use of the application, but we 40-somethings had our games and toys in the past as well, and I'm sure they looked just as pointless back then to our parents as some of the social networking does to us today (though I'd personally like to see the end of goatse and Rickrolling). And I am convinced that those old pursuits of pleasure and entertainment were just as responsible as anything else for us having this rich robust backbone today—that, pointless tweets aside, also helps surgeons to work across continents, or distributes projects like protein folding and building cognitive models across thousands of computers, and communicates instantly around the world. I mean, if I were sufficiently motivated (and had enough free time), I could take just about any university program online now: An unlimited education for the cost of my network connection.

I don't think it's a paradox to say that the entertainment and frivolity of computers in my generation's past is what, in part, makes the serious and useful world of web applications and communications possible today.

That's game-changing.

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