What is the perfect “Geek Year” to be born in?
Raph Koster wrote an incredibly interesting and thought provoking blog post here: The perfect geek age?
Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?
- It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
- I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
- It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
- And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
- In real arcades.
- New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
- I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
- And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
- I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
- I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
- I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
- And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
- And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
- I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
- I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
- I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
- …and also got to see the Web unfold…
- …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
- …and see some of the science fiction coming true.
What do you think the best “Geek Year” was to be born?
Tomorrow. =)
And I don’t mean that to be entirely facetious, some things worked well for certain ages, but what comes next I can hardly imagine. But that also means it’s kind of our job to make the next few decades work out perfectly for those born tomorrow.
It has definitely been an exciting era to be a geek. I was born a couple of years before you, and as a telecomms engineer I got to work in the field of mobile telecomms from back when when a mobile phone was the size of a briefcase, to working on smartphone operating systems. I played MUDs and MUSHes at Uni when I wasn’t messing around on Usenet. I worked for an internet company during the 2000-2002 internet boom. I bought my first DVD player so that I could import The Matrix from a really cheap US website and see the extras. I bought some shoes from boo.com! I used twitter when … ok actually that was last year
And all of this makes me think that although it’s been an amazing geek era, it just goes to show that a lot of it is in the mindset. If you aren’t afraid of new things and use them wholeheartedly, it’s always a good era to be a geek.
1977 was probably even better. The first geeks of 1971 started making their own games around the age of 16-18 (1987-early 1990s era) in while I was still 10-12.
As a German I also needed a few extra years to play Might & Magic and similar more text intensive games, as all games were in English. School actually did something for me!
I remember when I once asked for the “original” English version of a game and got told, the German version is the native version. I think it was the game “Gothic”, IIRC… I am still used to play the English version even if there is a translation available.
I am quite sure that there are new and exciting games out there for the kids from today. Just think about World of Warcraft. It might bore ME to hell… but for those NEW to the genre, it is nothing short of amazing.
I am also not sure if I do not just miss to recognize new trends and developments, e.g. I am not a fan of Manga/Anime comic style and the mobile phone, MP3 and other portable devices madness did not touch me that much. I never got into portable gaming, though it was the rave when I was still young.
So maybe I am just like Aristotle and see only the bad in today’s youth. He made some interesting statements about the atrocities of younger persons that still apply today. Speaking about the youth from the perspective of an old fart, it still bothers me to have passed the 30 already, I am not that old…
But I think Raph Koster has a point, other people would not call it the perfect geek age, but rather a time of media change. From literacy to TV to the internet, new ways of information and gaming abound in our ever faster changing time.
Add in the luxury that wars are fought in foreign countries and not at home, despite constant economical crisis, everyone being part of “western culture” lives indeed in a blessed age IMO.
1968, definitely. Peace and love, baby!
Ohhh, you mean for geeks? I don’t think that really started till the 70s, unless you count the moon landing.
Now look what you did. I feel old and ungeeky.
I was born in 1972 so I can definitely understand where Raph was coming from.
I think he makes a very good point that the “computer age” began right when people born about this time were at the perfect age for it – 10-15 or so. You are old enough to understand it, and young enough to view it with an incredible sense of childlike wonder.
I was a 1980 kid, so I missed out on some of the experiences Raph noted. But getting into PCs and the Internet as they were being born was still a special experience. Text-only Internet connections got me into MUDs, which got me into programming, which has in turn influenced my hobbies and career for decades.
As a teenager, I remember being saddened by the increasing complexity and computerization of cars. I wished that I’d been born when it was more normal/possible/practical to do more than basic work (fluids, filters, etc) in your driveway. In a similar way (I believe), the guts of computer hardware/software continue to get abstracted/complicated. There’s a bit of pressure to understand those guts when they’re newer and haven’t gotten pretty/polished/automated yet. It’s certainly still possible to dig in of course, but I can’t help but feel that I’d be overwhelmed trying to start my geek life now.
I suppose the next generation will feel the same way.
Yeah, I was born in 1977, so I experienced a fair amount of this stuff as well. I cut my teeth on a Commodore Vic 20 and a Tandy Color Computer when I was about 7 or 8 years old. Like Koster, my earliest computer experiences involved typing in programs from magazines and the like. By the time I was 10 I was successfully modifying them, and by the time I was a teenager I was coding my own stuff.
I was a little bit slow getting into the internet era. I’d been using local bulletin board systems and playing games over modem for about 4 years before I got into it. I loved the text based BBS games, and that’s what ultimately brought me onto the internet. A friend of mine had quit playing the local BBS games, and when I asked why, she told me she’d been playing an internet text game called Threshold. So I got online, and checked it out. It hooked me, and for the first 6 months or so I was on the net, all I was using it for was telnetting to Threshold.
I was also big on arcades. Street Fighter 2 was pretty much my defining game. Double Dragon was probably the first game I really loved. I really miss the days where every mall had at least 5 or 6 arcade games kicking around the hallways, along with a dedicated arcade. Some arcade experience would do modern internet gamers good. There was always trash talk in the arcades, but there are certain lines you didn’t cross unless you were looking to get your ass kicked. Such lines unfortunately don’t exist in online gaming, and thus the players say some pretty stupid and offensive stuff.
That’s an interesting perspective… By playing in arcades, you had to learn “acceptable” boundaries of trash talk. Then that carried over into online gaming.
But nowadays, nobody ever learns what “acceptable” trash talk is, and instead just behave like total devolved cretins.
Yeah. One point that I meant to mention that I didn’t really get around to, was I came up at pretty much the perfect age for the birth of competitive gaming. Street Fighter II and Doom/Quake were basically the forefathers of competitive video gaming, and I was a the perfect age to take advantage of it. I was old enough to be able to focus my attention on those games, but still way too young to have any sort of responsibility that would pull me away from gaming.