The passing of time
I guess it was about the age of sixty that I finally ‘grew up’ and deliberately decided to embrace old age. It seemed a sensible move when the alternative was to become an embarrassment to myself – i.e. by my ever-decreasingly successful attempts to try to hold my paunch in; fighting a losing battle to lose my hair where I once had it and stop it growing where I once didn’t; struggling to keep abreast of the very latest trends in technology and social media when to be frank I hadn’t been able to keep up – not just with the previous ones – but indeed with the ones before that; and having to feign interest in the latest developments in world sports like cricket which I neither understood nor indeed any longer cared about enough to bother.
My thrust at the time, which as regular readers may recall I shared with my followers on the Rust, was that – having gone through the ‘difficult middle-aged stage’ of fending off with increasing desperation every sign of advancing years as they inevitably emerged – to then come out the other side and simply relax and accept the vicissitudes of old age was actually one of the great joys of human existence. There was a huge sense of relief to be gained from just lying back, accepting that one was ‘past it’ and being able to laugh at all those still ‘raging against the dying of the light’ and making fools of themselves.
As it happens, overnight I was tootling around the newspaper websites this morning when another glaring example of an obvious signal of becoming old suddenly hit me between the eyes.
Video games.
To me in my seventh decade, video games originally and basically consisted of that desperately primitive, but infuriating and addictive, ‘computer tennis’ game in which a little square ‘ball’ could be whacked back and forth within a rectangular (at least I think it was rectangular) ‘box’, via means of a thin ‘tennis bat’ operated via a keyboard or hand-held control device.
This arrival of this game had just about as big an impact upon the world as the Beatles’ first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in America. Everyone was occupied for years, playing it for hours and hours.
And then suddenly things got a bit more sophisticated – just as the early Sinclair and Amstrad computers made way for ‘several jumps forward at once’ Apple and Microsoft products.
Later I remember for a period being much taken with a computer ‘golf game’ and similar (usually sports-based) products.
But leap forward the best part of four decades to 2016 and I can now register that the world of video games had advanced further than I could ever have imagined.
It’s now called ‘gaming’, of course, and there are literally hundreds of magazines, websites, chat-rooms and indeed television, radio and internet magazine shows especially devoted to reviewing new products, covering the latest technical developments and even speculating what is yet to come. One occasionally comes across features on nerdy teenage games-writers [is that the correct term?] who have made their first £10 million before they gave up using nappies.
I even think I read somewhere that the global video games industry is just as large, commercial and profitable as that of Hollywood and Bollywood combined.
My point is that – as I understand it, my own kids being (I suspect) far too old to have been afflicted by it – these days hundreds of millions of teenagers of both – or should I say ‘all’ – genders are spending their years between the ages of 12 and 19 … when not communicating with each other via their smartphones … locked in their bedrooms living in a ‘virtual’ world by playing videos games of every description, many of them built around war games, ‘drugs and street crime’ scenarios and sport.
Only about three weeks ago I heard a radio interview with some kid who had just been signed, not long out of school, by Manchester City as their first ‘gaming’ guru – simply because so many young fans, and particularly potential fans, spend so much time gaming that Premiership soccer clubs these days need to be ‘across’ the pastime, just like they need to get their commercial tentacles into every other area of young life in the 21st Century.
And where does that leave us ‘sixty-somethings’?
Blissfully off the pace, I’d venture to suggest …
