Friday, May 07, 2004
 
Book Review: Video Fever: Entertainment? Education? Or Addiction? by Charles Beamer (1982)

As you all know by now if you've been reading these book reviews and haven't skipped over them to get to the snarky humor, I read a lot of books that are not only sociological studies, but also are artifacts of their time periods. What they say about whatever they're talking about reflects the time in which they're written as much as the subject they cover. So I picked this book for under a buck during one of those binges of used book-buying in which my my beautiful wife and I often indulge.

I read it over the course of a couple weeks during my lunches at work. I even pasted a number of Post-It notes into the book with snarky comments so I could do a longer, more reasoned evaluation of the book. However, since it's been on my desk here, just to the right of the MfBJN mainframe for a couple of weeks now, this is all you get. Sorry.

You can pretty much guess how the book's going to go from the title. Unfortunately, the book's cover doesn't have the proper soap opera score to illustrate the way you should read the title. Ideally, it would be Video Fever: Entertainment? [piano tinkle] Education? [tinkle] or Addiction [heavy chord DUM DUM!]

Charles Beamer, high school teacher, examines the video game craze as you would expect a high school teacher might. He goes to video arcades (remember them?), asks questions to which anyone not called "faculty" in a professional capacity would raise an eyebrow, and then extrapolates results from a limited statistical sample.

You know what he found?

Bad elements liked to hang out in arcades, smoke marijuana, and sometimes those bad kids stole a couple bucks from their parents' purses or wallets to play. Sometimes, games were the "only friend" of the players, and other anthropomorphic mayhem ensued. Beamer "examines" the typical player archetypes, from the preteen misfits to the 20-somethings blowing off steam. He briefly examines the benefits that video games might provide--raising a generation comfortable with that fad "computer" thing.

But he's just waiting to get into the harm video games provide. Stealing quarters from parking meters. Smoking pot (brother, have we got a surprise for you in a couple years, when people start to smoke crystallized cocaine). Antisocial superpredators--no, wait, sorry, that's what latchkey crack babies movies or GTA would later provide. As a result, the tail end of Generation X has no hope at all.

Then he examines what can be done, which devolves from a study of good family life into a screed favoring extremely strict Christian discipline. Frankly, that particular turn in an attempted even-handed sociological study couldn't have been more jarring if the author had written Iä! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

So it's an amusing tract, almost worth the thirty-three and a third cents I paid for it (if that much). I'm not sure it's worth the hours I spent reading it, but hey, I'm jumping on that grenade for you, gentle reader, to spare you the horror.



Marginalia:

As I mentioned, I noted some sections for extra snarkage. I'd hate to have wasted all those expensive little yellow slips with adhesive on one end, so I've included the best for you below:
  • p11:
      It's dark inside arcades and video game centers, womblike, comforting, exciting. Lights flash and flicker seductively in many colors from strange and alluring sources. Sounds of battle beckon the players to death-defying heroism, courageous exploits hardly possible in the ordinary worlds of school and home, and hours and hours of fun!
    Jeez, man, I'll admit my mother smoked cigarettes while I was gestating, so I remember the womb as dark, soft, and warm (or so I remmeber through the recovered memories). What was your mother smoking to make her womb like a freaking video arcade while you were gestating?

  • In a section called "Tricks of the Trade":
      A distributors' [sic, and from a TEACHER no less] problem that makers assist in solving is "burn-out" among players who become tired of playing the same games in the same places. One tick the markers use is to provide distributors with decals and pop-in microchips; the decals slide under the tabletop on the front of the machine, making it look like an entirely new machine, and the exchange of microchips changes the way the machine plays in a way so the playes believe it is a new game.
    You heard it here first. JAMMA is a trick! played upon poor, unsuspecting quarter-thieving, ganja-smoking teens. Except swapping the boards (not just the chips, brother) does make a new game. Of course, Beamer's technical comprehension is limited.

  • p67, introduction to the chapter "Do Video Games Harm Anyone?"
      Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves. There are people who can find joy hidden in even the most tragic situation, and there are others who cannot be satisfied or made happy no matter what their experience of joy. We see ourselves and our experiences uniquely, and "real facts" are distorted and shaped and changed by any number of factors--how we feel about ourselves, our memory of past experiences, and our expectations of a situation.
    Just put down the epistemology and back slowly away before you harm yourself and others. "Perceptions of experiences are more important than the experiences themselves"? Jeez, whatever your mother was smoking must have been potent.

  • p135, in "Appendix B: How the Games Work":
      Home-delivery systems have been heralded as the "coming thing." Promoters say that soon (even now in some areas) it will be possible for you to shop for groceries or any other product from your home.
    Well, it took a couple years, by Cosmo and Webvan took right care of that. Note to younger readers: In the later part of the last century, two Internet companies called Cosmo and Webvan got lots of venture capital to lose trying to do just that. "Even now in some areas" would take eighteen years from Beamer's prognostication to be proven unready. Cripes, it's 2004, and I have to explain Webvan.

  • p136, the real pain sets in when Beamer describes how arcade games are programmed in Basic [sic] where a pyxel [sic] is manipulated and a byte is 1000 [sic] bits and wherein
      Two other terms now come into play, and both refer to program commands in response to a player's action. The first term is "poke." Poke is a command meaning "go to" some pyxel or matrix on the screen. When a player fires the cannons or lasers of his spaceship to destroy an asteroid or a space invader, the microprocessor understands only "Poke." On a microchip, an impulse flashes toward a number of pyxels in a direct line (a line that appears direct on the screen but actually is moving diagonally or slantwise across tiny dots) toward the edge of the screen.
      The second term is "peek." It is a command meaning "look ahead." The microprocessor is asking a microchip to look ahead of the "poke" command to see if there is anything along the line of "poke." If there is, then another subprogram goes into operation: a collision occurs, an invader is blown up, lights flash, sound blares.
    In Beamer's world, upright arcade games are written in mangled Commodore BASIC 2.0. I'd weep for Babylon, too, if I were projecting the future across these flawed sightlines.

- posted by Brian J. @ 10:59 PM
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