It’s 1983, I’m seven years old, and I have a giant snail growing on my hand…
As this is the first post in what I intend to become a reflective journal of my passion for play, games, gaming and game-based learning, I thought I’d start with my first experience of digital games and gaming, and how it impacted my life, leading me right here, now.
A Digital Frontier
I was first introduced to gaming when my grandparents bought me an ‘Atari 2600’ game console and the game ‘Turtles’, a console version of a full scale arcade game. I was just seven years old and I loved that console and that game. My brother could take or leave it, but I knew this was what I wanted to do with my free time, and at seven, I had a lot of it.
I didn’t realise it until much later in life, but this technology, the device and game, was to have a profound effect on me, driving a curiosity and passion that remains at the core of my work and free time to this day.
It would be unfair to sell this post as all a bright and hopeful coming of digital age story. In fact, so bizarre might seem the next part, that it could be likened to some dark origin story from a superhero (or villain) universe instead. It would turn out that games and gaming were to have a phycological, emotional, and physiological impact on me.
Digital Dreams
To this day I vividly remember waking in the night in a kind of ‘awake but dreaming’ state. Knowing exactly where I was – in my room, on my bunk bed, my brother sleeping in the bunk below me, my Fraggle Rock bed covers wet with sweat. I could see and feel a snail growing on my hand! From barely visible to the naked eye, to it’s sluggish body flopping over the sides of my hand, it’s dark, shiny shell moving slowly from left to right. I held hold out my hand and cried for my mum, shouting “get the snail off my hand”. This was not a one off either. It became a recurring nightmare.
Other nights I would wake in the same state but my mind confused by dreams of contrast in texture and movement. For example, I would dream I picked up a stone that was smooth in appearance, but it was jagged and painful to touch. I couldn’t hold it even though it was perfectly smooth to look at. I also dreamed that a giraffe was walking slowly towards me but its legs were a circular blur as they moved too fast to see. Cartoon-like, yet real. Again, this would upset me and I would wake and cry for my mum who would wake me fully and then put me back to bed again.
I should state here that my mum brought me up with the most healthy outdoor childhood any child could hope for. I lived in a small town in rural Scotland, surrounded by fields, on the edge of a forest, and on the coast. I played almost eternally outdoors, looking for bird nets, building ‘gang huts’ and tree swings, collecting rabbit and mice skulls, crabbing, fishing, and chasing frogs. Perhaps it was the extremes of these two worlds that caused such a response. Crossing the digital divide. Two worlds colliding.
A Digital Diagnosis
After a few instances of these waking dreams, my mum took me to the family doctor who initially had no idea what it could be. He put it down to growth, or stress at school (I was bullied a lot as a child). When I mentioned my games he asked me about them, I told him enthusiastically about the Turtles game and how he should play it too. After several visits and a further consultation the doctor suggested that the game was the problem.
He surmised that the snail on my hand was the sensation I felt after playing with the style of joystick that came with the console. I would hold it in the open palm of my left hand and use my right hand to control the stick above. This movement aggravated the nerves in the palm of my hand and I would wake at night to the tingling of it. I was experiencing a physiological response from my gaming! A memory in my skin and muscle.
The contrasting stone texture, and slow but speedy giraffe were direct results of the game mechanics itself.
In Turtles, you could pick up pills (like Pacman), which had different effects on your character. One was to speed it up and another was to slow it down, moving you faster or slower around the maze. The issue was that the basic animation for the turtle didn’t change, and so the legs moved at the same speed regardless of the speed your turtle actually moved. My brain transferred this to other animals and even people in my sleep.
The smooth yet jagged stone was the ever changing condition of the little creatures that chased the turtle. They would change when the turtle picked up a pill, from a spiky ball to a smooth ball, and run away. Inevitably, I would be caught out chasing them when they switched back, and so my dreaming mind was never sure if something would be smooth or jagged when I picked it up.
A Digital Dawn
I know now that my mind wasn’t able to process one reality from another. My sense of the real world merged and mixed up with that of a coded alternative. The answer back then was to limit my digital play time and rotate the games I played. I had a few. Considerations I still promote for concerned parents today. The adults around me were just as new to this technology as the children. It was the early 80’s and gaming was both in its infancy and its prime. From physical arcades, to movies like Tron and The Last Starfighter, to the introduction of the first BBC computers in schools. Concerns about screen time weren’t even on the horizon, let alone the kind of things I was experiencing.
A Digital Destiny
At the time it was awful. No doubt a trauma of a kind. But as a reflecting adult I find this is fascinating and I do believe that to have experienced the birth of this amazing technology, and to have it leave such a physiological, emotional, and psychological mark on me as a child, was the catalyst for much of my life’s path and approach to games as tools for education.
I believe in a digital reality. I believe our digital experiences, in digital spaces, with digital assets and even digital interactions with both coded and living people, are very real and can be very important. I believe they affect and impact us in ways we can’t always articulate or quantify. I’ve built a career on and in digital worlds. I believe that code is a language of landscapes, and a landscape of language, bridging one reality to another. Where we find our own pixelated and unblinking visage staring back at us. Our thoughts and feelings, fears and passions, and even our biases laid out for us to face.
In 1983, my young mind wasn’t able to discern one me from the other. One reality from another. Was I chasing digital or very real turtles in my sleep?
To this day, when demoing VR at public events, I don’t allow children under 10yrs to use the VR equipment as a direct result of this experience. I believe games are windows, doors, or portals to other worlds. Games are escapism, stories as landscapes, creative canvases, empathy tests, and more. Not just in our imagination, but as real and full sensory experiences. Spaces and places both our minds and bodies can be immersed in, and respond to, and learn from. We can see, hear, and feel these experiences. We can believe they are real. I believe I was plugged in to something back then that infused in my being, and forged the foundations of what I was to become.
If the snail could have spoken, I believe it would have whispered “Ready Player One”.