The games we play

A most marvellous weekend away with some old friends from high school got me thinking about some of the eccentricities of our generation. When we met in the late-1980s, Australia was celebrating its bicentenary, Gorbachev began a program of economic restructuring in the Soviet Union and withdrew troops from Afghanistan, special effects in films such as Beetlejuice and Who framed Roger Rabbit seemed terribly creative and exciting and the most sophisticated computer games involved two Italian brothers searching for gold coins in a mushroom kingdom.

Hey, it all made sense at the time.

What struck me about this little crowd was not so much that we were all suddenly looking old, or acting particularly grown up but quite the opposite. We weren’t looking in the slightest bit haggard and oddly enough games still made up an important aspect of our lives. You see while baby boomers had hobbies, past times and would tinker, build models planes and maybe do the odd bit of home DIY, Gen X seems almost entirely disinterested in such useful past times and we seem to spend most of our spare time playing games – lots of games.

No matter where you look, the integration of games and gaming into culture, while it may have begun earlier was picked up and popularised by Generation X. Role-playing games, which were developed in the ’70s but hit their heyday in the 1980s and are again in an upswing. The Society for Creative Anachronism, whose members spend their weekends dressing up in elaborate medieval clobber, was incorporated in the late 1960s and hit Australia almost exactly 30 years ago and is only one of a clutch of historical re-enactment groups that focus on everything from stone-age tools to early European settlers.

Living life as a game is taken to a whole new level when you consider the boom in reality TV, which is really watching people play life on some kind of competitive basis. Sure it’s been driven by commercial factors because of the opportunities for product placement but if it didn’t attract huge audiences it would never have become such a dominant genre.

We’re the adult gamers, the developers of games keep pointing to when they try to get the business world to take the industry more seriously and the people who turned Zynga into a serious cash cow for Facebook.

We’re the retro toy collectors, the certified Lego engineers, we’re the Star Walkers and Trekkies, we’re the generation who both talk to our cars and harbour the belief that the cars themselves will one day talk back. And now all this sci-fi and historicism has been mixed up into SteamPunk, which combines technology with a kind of funky shiny, copper, Victorian aesthetic.

My usual conclusion when it comes to Gen X eccentricities is that they’re a reaction to the fact that we spent most of our childhood expecting the Cold War to culminate in some kind of horrendous nuclear holocaust.

Or perhaps it’s a result of growing up in times of increasing material wealth and Dr Spokism, when kids were actually encouraged to play and express themselves (that’s Dr Spock the pediatrician, not the part-human, part-Vulcan Mr Spock for those Trekkies who’ve read this far).

Whatever the cause, I’ll be intrigued to see what happens to our own kids who are being brought up by adults just as likely to don a pair of fairy wings do to the gardening and a tiara to clean the house.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

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