Improv 250: 1980’s Video Game Life Lessons
I was born in 1971, so when video arcades hit in the 1980s I was a prime demographic. There was a short window of time before home consoles hit where the video arcade was a social place to go.
The benefits of going to a place and socializing with other kids is, I believe, a big deal.
Today there is the option of playing games with people you don’t know, which is great. But, they are people you never come into direct contact with. We need and crave human contact.
This isn’t a cranky post from a front porch about how things were better in the good ol’ days. Things are different. Things are always different. But in the 80’s video games taught some hard valuable life lessons.
For instance:
- Many of the games didn’t have instructions. You just dove in and had to figure things out; What to do. What was going on in the world. Who or what was harmless. Who or what meant you harm. You had to figure it out on your own. Or talk to someone who knew.
- It cost a quarter a shot to learn these hard lessons.
Sure, you’d get three lives, but after that you were back to the start. It didn’t matter how rich you were. Start over. - Sometimes you had powers and solutions you didn’t know about. They needed to be discovered.
- The game just got faster and more difficult until you died.
- You could never “win.”
Valuable life lessons.