So: another day, another lot of newspaper hand-wringing over video games. Recently, Telegraph columnist Celia Walden wrote a piece in which she despaired over the recent Fortnite World Cup. With little knowledge or actual evidence, she ended her opening paragraph with the words, "I can't begrudge Jaden Ashman his win. But I'm also convinced that video games like Fortnite will be responsible for so many lost childhoods." It's as though children have only just started to spend time obsessing over multiplayer games together. But they haven't.
During the long hot summers of the mid-1980s I was a young kid with a bad haircut and a good Commodore 64 games collection. I didn't want to go to the park with the cool boys to play football and smoke Silk Cuts which was fortunate because the cool boys didn't want me there either. From roughly the ages of 12 to 16 I wanted to be Madonna or Sigourney Weaver or Jeff Minter and that was a confusing psychological bundle for other boys to unravel.
I was fascinated by sport - the rules, the rivalry, Ivan Lendl's Adidas clothing collection - I just didn't want to play. Fortunately I had computer games and a few nerdy friends. During Wimbledon, we would don tennis whites (I'm not kidding) and hang around playing Match Point on a pal's Spectrum. Sure, the animation was erratic and the ball boys looked like racist caricatures from a 1930s cartoon, but it was fast and fun and, if we took turns and kept score, we could get through the whole tournament before Knightrider started.
from Eurogamer.net
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