From the Archives - Video Gaming in the ‘80s

Introduction

It’s pretty clear video games are insanely popular … perhaps too much so. Time magazine has called them “the greatest threat facing America.” (Note: I totally made that up.) A grown man was mugged in my neighborhood a decade or so ago, an obvious target because he was walking down the sidewalk absorbed in his Game Boy. The very next day I saw him again, this time at the nearby train station, still absorbed in his Game Boy. I couldn’t decide whether to push him on to the tracks or mug him myself so I slipped between the horns of the dilemma by silently pitying him.

Considering the wealth of smartphone gaming apps, and gamers’ souped-up computers, and X-Boxes and Playstations etc., it seems like we must be in the heyday of video games. What’s seldom remembered is that there was a lull in this national pastime, when kids got too lazy to trek out to the arcades but before the time when the home consoles got really sophisticated. This post, from my archives, documents a bit of that time, and wistfully recalls what I once took to have been the glory days of video games. I wrote this in college, when I was a student at UC Santa Barbara.

Video Gaming in the ‘80s - December 7, 1988

We can all remember the big video game days, back when there were fifteen arcades in town, all offering at least ten tokens on the dollar. Machines were scrubbed shiny; knobs were packed with grease or oil for extra smoothness. These were the salad days of the gaming world. Finding any kid was as easy as remembering which arcade he preferred. We were good, too. Any seasoned vidiot could play for at least forty‑five minutes on one token. But alas, kids eventually came around and the arcades died out suddenly, just like the dinosaurs.

It’s a good thing, too, because the games being designed today are not so innocent and harmless as what we played back then. My favorite was Tempest, a game in which your “guy” (a random thingy shaped kind of like a C-clamp] skittered around on the edge of a geometrically shaped hole shooting abstract figures, which had names like flippers, tankers, spikers, and fuzzballs. Shooting a tanker caused it to vomit up two flippers, complicating your job. When you’d destroyed everything coming up from the hole, you flew through it (avoiding dangerous spikes that could skewer you), then briefly through space (on autopilot, apparently), and landed on another hole to shoot more figures.

If you didn’t like shooting stuff, you could drive a racecar; that was a popular format. It started with Monaco GP which had really lame graphics; when Turbo came out I like that a lot better.

Then we got Pole Position. Its graphics were so amazing, it was tempting to throw over Turbo entirely, except that a game of Pole Position just didn’t last very long (typically 90 seconds). Sure, you could get Extended Play if you drove well enough, but if you got really good at it, eventually you’d make it to the Finish line and then—well, you’d be finished! I was pretty ticked the first time that happened, but then what did I expect? It’s the Finish line!

Or you blasted spaceships. That was the meat and potatoes of the vidiot. Those games were abstract, and promoted manual dexterity. Today, a typical video game involves beating up street thugs and prostitutes with clubs, or gunning down soldiers with a machine gun. I know this because last summer I went bowling with the boys from Broad Street Bikes and we observed the mêlée. I have to wonder what the lasting psychological effect of such blatantly violent games is on our youth. But all preaching aside, I must confess that recently, I have visited the arcade here [in Isla Vista] on more than one occasion.

It’s nothing like the old days. But one night, a few months ago, I was out with the boys and we wandered into Video Madness [a video rental place]. They had a bunch of the new-fangled games. I could hear the grunting of the street thugs as they pulverized each other, and the shrieks of the karate champs as they beat each other into submission. But over at the end of the dark room was a Tempest machine. I had to investigate.

Alas, the original knob was gone … the machine was out of order. But right next to it was Space Duel. For me, this game is nostalgic, since [my brother] Bryan and I used to play it back during the glory days of video games. I even talked Mom into playing it with me once, although I doubt she’d remember.

[This video is amazing, by the way. It’s an Atari ad showcasing the game in order to sell it to arcades. It even shows, here, how to set dip switches on the printed circuit board to select different languages.]

Space Duel is a totally unique game among the rest. The graphics are nothing special, the controls are nothing unique, but the method of play is unlike any other. There are various options of gameplay, but my favorite is the cooperative play mode. Two spaceships, joined about their rotational axes by a short rod, are controlled by two different players, who work together to blast various octahedra and other geometric shapes. The cooperation is key. While the players rack up individual scores (the object of any video game), they also rely on each other for survival. Kind of reminds you of the real world, don’t it? And when one player gets hit, his ship is seriously disabled, and his partner begins to outscore him. The wounded player almost longs, at this point, to get hit again so that he and his pal both get new ships and his point deficit is minimized.

The tragedy of the commons is ever‑present here. The injured player has seemingly little to gain from preserving his friend’s life, since this limits his own ability to get points. But if he decides to end it all, he hurts the common fighting unit. And remember, he’s here at the arcade playing with a friend … who would do that to a friend? Well, almost anyone actually. I mean, it’s not like there’s no recourse … your friend can always punch your arm or something. Still, the point of the game isn’t just to score points—it’s to make the game last as long as possible. So you usually limp on.

[Oddly enough, I didn’t know at the time that Space Duel was kind of hip, in a way. The Who had featured it on the cover of their 1982 album “It’s Hard.”]

Naturally, Space Duel can also be played by one person alone, and I haven’t lost the touch. I mostly drop in to Video Madness after intense study sessions, to remind myself how trivial school is when you’re fighting for your very existence against a variety of colorful geometric foes. I’ve discovered that I can actually use my score to monitor my stress levels. The lower my overall stress in my life, I have realized, the better I do at the game.

Occasionally, the game itself begins to cause me stress. I mean, losing at anything can be emotionally taxing, and in the moment it can be hard to remember this is just a game. When this happens, and it dawns on me that I’m paying good money to stress myself out, I fire my thrusters on full, sending my ship reeling out of control to its eventual death and the end of the game. In this way I remind the video machine that times have changed, and—unlike the game-possessed vidiots of the past—now I am the master.

Postscript

For further reading, specifically on the video game of the future, check out this fictional albertnet post: Robotron 2084’.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Stage Play - TV Ears Saved Our Marriage!

Introduction

This stage play is a work of fiction.  That said, I cannot deny that it was inspired by an actual product.  Also, certain characters herein have broad similarities to individuals who might actually exist, but these are used fictitiously.

TV EARS SAVED OUR MARRIAGE!

A Play in Two Acts

Dramatis Personae:

DARLENE, a Californian

JACK, her husband

LIZ, a marriage counselor

Act One

Scene:  A comfortable, cozy consultation room.  LIZ sits in an armchair.  DARLENE and JACK sit side by side, several feet apart, on a sofa that faces LIZ.  On a side table is a giant box of Kleenex. 

[DARLENE clutches a well-worn stuffed bear, a fixture of the office.]

DARLENE:  I just feel like Jack is always lording his supposed superior education over me!  He’s always quoting this or that article from Parade magazine just because he knows I don’t like to read!  [She blows her nose.]  It’s just that I’m more of a visual person.

JACK:  I’m not always reading.  Hey, you know what this reading thing is really about?  I just want to turn on the closed captioning when we watch TV!  Because I can’t understand the dialog!  But she doesn’t like closed captioning.  She says its distracting!

DARLENE:  Well, everybody knows you can’t read and watch TV at the same time!  Unless you’re, like, actually deaf.  Those people have ways of compensating.

LIZ:  I think you both have a point here.  Jack quite reasonably wants to be able to follow the TV program but can’t hear the dialogue.  And Darlene, you’re right that multi-tasking is overrated.  Many studies show it’s actually impossible.  But I’m wondering if there might be some middle ground here?

JACK:  Well, I have this hearing aid, but Darlene won’t let me turn it up!  She’s always telling me to turn it down, even in front of other people, which is just—well, I find it humiliating!  [Leans forward, elbows on his knees, and buries his face in his hands.]

DARLENE:  Well, Jack, like I’ve tried to explain a thousand times, if your hearing wasn’t so bad you would know that your hearing aid makes this high-pitched whine and it really disturbs people!  You embarrass me with it!  [Stares at stuffed bear, then sets it down on the couch, steals a glance at Jack, then faces Liz.]  Liz, I don’t think Jack even respects me and so often I feel like I’m just at the end of my rope!  I don’t see any hope here at all!

LIZ:  Oh, Darlene, I know things can seem hopeless, but they’re really not!  Look, I’ve worked with a lot of couples for years—I mean, I’ve really seen it all—and sometimes things really are irreconcilable.  But in your case, I don’t feel that way at all.  I believe that you and Jack actually have a very strong marriage!  I think you need a few adjustments but you’re actually really close!

JACK:  You really think so?  What makes you say that?

LIZ:  Well for one thing, you both like to watch the same TV programs!  Isn’t that right?

[JACK and DARLENE look at each other.]

DARLENE:  Well, that’s true!  We’ve always liked the same shows.

LIZ:  Did you know there are lots of couples who can’t even agree on what to watch?  And couples where one person doesn’t even watch TV at all?

JACK:  Is that right?  That’s just … well, that would be so lonely!

LIZ:  You’re right!  Listen, I think there’s a solution here, and it’s actually pretty simple!  I’m going to recommend this product to you that I think will make all the difference.  Have you heard of TV Ears?

[JACK and DARLENE shake their heads.]

LIZ:  TV Ears are a wonderful product that has helped over a million people hear the TV more clearly.  This product uses wireless digital technology that amplifies the TV sound on a per-user basis.  So Jack, you could wear the TV Ears and set the volume exactly where you want it on your TV Ear headset, so you don’t have to turn up the sound!  Darlene can set the TV at a level that is comfortable for her.  With TV Ears it’s really a win-win for your marriage!

JACK:  Gosh.  That sounds intriguing … but also kind of complicated.  Is it some giant apparatus, and will I have to get a new TV?

LIZ:  No, it weighs less than two ounces and will work with any television set!  Not only that, but it has voice clarifying circuitry specifically designed to make the dialogue easier to follow.  And you know what else?  [LIZ lowers her voice to a hush.]  As a certified marriage counselor I can get you a special discount.

DARLENE:  I think this really might be just the thing for us!  Jack, what do you think?

JACK:  I’m willing to give it a try!

LIZ:  Great!  Now, TV Ears aren’t sold in stores but I’ll order a set for you.  As you’ll recall, I’m on vacation for the next couple of weeks, which should work out just right.  By the time we meet again you’ll have had a chance to try the TV Ears.  And now … I see our time is up for today.

JACK and DARLENE exit.

Act Two

Scene:  LIZ’s consultation room, as before.  Jack and Darlene are on the sofa again, but this time sitting very close together.

JACK:  Liz, you’re a genius!  The TV Ears have made all the difference.  Now that we can get along during our TV time, all our other problems seem to have just melted away!

DARLENE:  It’s true.  Now, instead of fighting at bedtime, we sit up talking well into the night about the show we just watched!

JACK:  I have to admit, I never used to like talking about our TV programs because I was always so lost!  Now TV is like a whole new world for me!  And the TV Ears are so comfortable, I forget I have them on!  And you know what else?  It’s like we’re ... engaging better, with the programs.  It used to be that the TV would just be on, but I wasn’t really even paying attention to it.  I feel like we’re, you know, committing more now.

LIZ:  That’s wonderful!  I could tell just from the way you two are looking at each other that you’ve really turned the corner.  Hearing loss is devastating for couples and families, and nowhere is that more apparent than the TV room.

DARLENE:  It’s funny you should mention families.  TV Ears have helped our grandkids, too!

LIZ:  Is that right?  Tell me all about it!

DARLENE:  Well, my daughter was visiting with her kids, and when we showed her the TV Ears, she got really excited.  She has two small sons, and the younger one, Roger, is a very sensitive child.  Those two kids always fight when they play video games because Clint wants the volume way up, but Roger gets distracted by the sound, and it makes him all flustered and upset.

JACK:  It’s the screaming that gets him.  They love “Grand Theft Auto” but the whores scream a lot when you kill them.  [Grins.]

DARLENE:  So now Clint wears the TV Ears, and Roger turns the TV volume all the way off!  Roger’s scores are much higher now that he can concentrate better, and they have much more fun together.  And even when they’re not playing, I can see the difference.  Roger is less … less sullen now.  My daughter is so relieved!

LIZ:  I’m so happy to hear it!  You see, sometimes there really is a simple solution to what seems like an impossible problem.  I haven’t heard before of the TV Ears helping with children but it makes perfect sense.  [Sighs contentedly.]  I think you two are really on your way, so I’m going to suggest this:  we can stop the scheduled sessions here.  Keep using the TV Ears, and if you feel like everything’s still going well, I think we’re all done!  But if for some reason you two still feel like you’re having problems, you can always schedule another session with me on an as-needed basis.  Does that sound good?

[JACK and LIZ look at each other.]

JACK:  I’m good with that if you are, honey.

DARLENE:  Yes!  I think so!  I’m so much happier now.  Thank you for everything, Liz.  And thank you, TV Ears!

Fiction - Robotron 2084'

NOTE:  This post is rated R for a single instance of mild strong language that I couldn’t bring myself to omit.

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction.  The normal disclaimers apply.  Even the language used, though it bears a strong resemblance to American English, is made-up and used fictitiously.  And yet, if you read this through to the end, you may decide there is an important kernel of Truth within.

Robotron: 2084’

Okay, I’ve been spending a lot of time playing this video game but I think I’m done now.  It was just so nostalgic when I spotted the game in the little pizza place near the office I sometimes go to for lunch.  It’s almost exactly like the Robotron: 2084 console I used to play on in the pool hall on Pardall in Isla Vista, during my college days.  Surely you remember this game, though in your head you probably hear “Robo-tron” while I always called it “Robot-Ron.”  But this console, in the pizzeria, is a subtly different version called Robotron: 2084’ (which I assume is pronounced “2084-prime”).

Physically it’s the same:  same small color screen, same utterly basic graphics, same two knobs (one to move in any direction, one to fire in any direction).  At first, even the gameplay is almost identical:  everything coming at your guy like a damn frenzy, certain enemies you can’t kill, and of course the humans you have to save.  At first the main thing you notice with 2084’ is that the sound is better, like there’s a subwoofer in the cabinet.  But then you discover that your gun seems to overheat or need a reload or something, so you have to be a little more economical with your shots.  Hold the knob down for too long and it stops firing for a second or two.  This limitation increases as the game goes on.  And when you get into the higher levels, or waves, you get some different enemies to kill (which I’ll get to).  But mostly, it’s the same as ever.  I have no use for modern ultra-graphic first-person shooter games—once you get past the initial dazzle, they’re all the same boring crap—and don’t even get me started on Internet gaming.

So I have found Robotron: 2084’ oddly addictive, as much as when I was in college and we all spent more time in study breaks (aka, playing Robotron) than studying.  I’ve found myself eating at the pizzeria more and more often, and playing the game longer and longer afterward.  It’s become routine to still be at it when the nearby high schoolers get out of school.  At first they seemed annoyed to find me here.  But I’m fricking good at this game, having probably spent more years playing it than this console has even been here, so they all hang around to watch after the first kid has put his quarter on the sill to claim the next game.  (The beauty of this console is it still only requires a quarter.  Maybe they couldn’t retrofit it.)

I have to confess, the chatter of the kids is part of the enjoyment.  I feel like one of those really old dudes at that one park in Chinatown who play Go or poker on the stone tables, their pals gathered around bobbing and prattling away.  Now and then I catch my reflection in the console screen, and—shadowy as it is—my thin face and receding hairline make it pretty obvious I’m kind of old for video games.  Sometimes these high schoolers ask me questions, but I don’t answer.  For one thing I’m concentrating too hard, and for another I’m kind of afraid of becoming like The Guru.

The Guru was this guy who used to play Gauntlet in the student center at the university in Boulder where I played video games as a teen.  This guy was way too old to be a college kid, and in fact looked (and often smelled) pretty close to homeless.  He had this scraggly beard and everything, and he was phenomenal at Gauntlet.  Maybe playing it had become, for him, the cheapest way to be indoors out of the cold.  He could go forever and kept up a constant monologue of advice and strategy.  My friend Bob, who loved Gauntlet, hung on the guy’s every word, but I think we all sort of pitied him.  I mean, a forty-something who’s that good at a video game?  Get a life!

Not that I should talk, canceling meetings and conference calls and even sometimes calling my wife to say I’m working late, all just to play Robotron: 2084’.  Yes, I fully understand how lame that is.  But there’s just this one new enemy I couldn’t figure out how to kill, and felt for weeks like I was on the brink of a breakthrough—there was just something familiar about this enemy, and if I could figure out how to kill it I could finally clear this wave and see what the next one is like.  That’s all I want, I’ve been telling myself—to clear this one wave. 

The new enemy looks like a sidewinder snake.  It moves like lightning, and once it heads for you there’s nothing to do but flee.  Sure, the game has always had the Hulks that you can’t kill, but they’re pretty slow.  The Sidewinders are fast and ruthless, and when you get to the wave that has them, it doesn’t matter how many lives you have left.  You’re toast within minutes.

And yet, they seem vulnerable; when you manage to shoot them, they change color for just a second, and there’s this low sound, a throb you can feel through the knobs.  This is the part that seemed familiar somehow, even though it’s nothing like the original Robotron: 2084.  It was a code I had to crack!  I wish I could start each game where I left off, because getting to this wave takes a good while, and then I have precious little time to work out the riddle.  For this last minute or so the high school kids are no longer jabbering.  They just gasp.

And finally, I hit upon the answer.  The Sidewinders are a bit like the Pulsars in Tempest, my other favorite 1980s video game.  In Tempest you’re moving your claw-like shooter along the rim of a geometrically shaped hole, shooting beasts that come up from below, and at a certain level you get the Pulsars that, with their rhythmic pulses, electrify the whole segment they’re on.  Touch that segment and you’re dead.  

To defeat the Pulsars you have to get into their rhythm, so you can pop over and shoot them between pulses.  That was a major breakthrough in playing Tempest, and killing these Sidewinders turns out to be similar:  it’s all about rhythm!  When they are stretched out straight, shooting them does nothing.  But in the Z-shaped phase of their slithering, you can shoot them and you get that color thing and the throb sound.  What I’ve discovered is, it takes three hits to kill them—but if you’re shooting continuously, your gun overheats and you can’t take the third shot.  But if you pop them—a quick stab of the knob, perfectly in sync with the throb of their slither—they die after three hits!  As soon as I discover this, I’m slaughtering them like lambs and my teenage spectators are going nuts.

They have no idea how I’m doing it, you see.  They probably never played Tempest.  (Maybe this is how the creators of Robotron: 2084’, who I picture as ageing nerd-hipsters with pure white ponytails who are happy to have one more retro-programming gig, show their respect for veteran gamers of their generation.)  As I perfect the sidewinder-killing technique I get closer and closer to that long-awaited next wave, and then suddenly:  I’m there.

The next level, though, is astonishing.  I’m braced for the most insane onslaught of all, but instead the screen is practically empty.  No Electrodes, no Grunts, no Hulks, no Sidewinders.  There are a few humans wandering around.  I head over to them to pick up some points, but my guy is moving more slowly now, and as I approach a human she seems repelled and just scoots away.  (She could have been turned evil, except there’s no sign of any Brains, or “Brain-fuckers” as we always called them.)  I keep waiting for the enemy attack but doesn’t come.  I risk flicking my eyes over to check out my score, and my jaw drops:  I’ve got the high-score!  I’ve finally outscored JOC!  (I assume that it’s just a coincidence that the initials at the top of the Robotron: 2084’ scoreboard are the same as those of my old junior high buddy Joaquin … surely he hasn’t moved West like me, and taken up Robotron again?)

All that’s on the screen besides humans are these little flowers in vases.  I try to shoot one, but I have no gun!  Just these little hands I can waggle with that knob.  I go over to try to pick up a vase but just knock it over.  I try again.  I pick it up and walk with it, then it falls from my hands.   “Dude, your score drops every time you break a vase!” one of the teenagers says.  I look up.  It’s true, and what’s more, my score is gradually dropping all the time.  Soon it’s back below JOC’s high-score.  And the game isn’t fun anymore.  There’s nothing to do!

Eventually it dawns on me what this wave must be called:  retirement.

That would explain my guy’s sluggish speed, and why his gun got taken away (“He might hurt himself!”).  The other humans, far from looking to him as their savior, no longer want anything to do with him.  And the teenagers watching me are starting to get restless.  They’re just waiting for me to die.  My score falls and falls.  I’m no longer relevant.  Eventually the manager of the pizzeria comes over.  “Uh, sir?  Apparently you’ve kind of had your turn at this game?  These other customers are asking if I can pull the plug to reset it for them?”

I turn and leave, and head back to the office.  Thank God it’s just a game. 

One-Size-Fits-All New Year's Resolution

NOTE:  This post is rated R for a couple instances of mild strong language.

Introduction

A couple years ago I blogged about new year’s resolutions and the difficulty I had in coming up with them.  That problem perhaps isn’t as common as the main problem these resolutions present:  that is, the difficulty of sticking with them.  In this post I examine this problem and provide my miraculous solution—a one-size-fits-all resolution that anybody can stick to.

The pitfalls of typical resolutions

One problem with so many resolutions is that they emphasize the negative.  Drink less, quit smoking, be more active, eat better, be less stressed—it’s like a laundry list of what’s wrong with you.  It’s no wonder they’re such a downer, even before we fail to achieve them.  What’s less obvious is the myopia of only trying to change only what we already know is wrong.  If we think of our overall life performance the way we’d look at our investment portfolio, we realize that looking only at known bad behaviors is like only watching the stocks we own, without asking a bigger question, “How much am I losing by not seeking out new investments?”  In other words, what opportunities may be lost when we focus only on our current failings?  Couldn’t failure of imagination be a much bigger problem than failing to curb bad habits?

Another problem with new year’s resolutions is that they’re too goal-oriented.  We’re always told that we should set specific, tangible, measurable goals.  I don’t agree.  I could go on about this, but I’ll save that discussion for its own post.  Suffice to say, the problem with really specific goals is that it’s too easy to fall short, and then we just give up.

Here’s an example.  I was at a San Francisco restaurant with a colleague last week.  While waiting a good while for another colleague to show up, we stared down a large drinking glass full of crispy bread sticks.  I wasn’t inclined to eat any—they’re utterly pointless, with a glycemic index of roughly infinity, and the butter you dip them in goes straight to your arteries.  But I started in, if for no other reason than to use up the butter so as to help my colleague, whom I assumed was struggling to resist the unhealthy snack.  (He’s good at sports but knows he’d be better if he lost ten or fifteen pounds.)  Our wait dragged on and soon I’d eaten enough breadsticks to consume most of the ramekin of butter, and I was feeling a bit disgusted with myself.  Suddenly, my colleague grabbed a breadstick and dug in.  “Oh, man, sorry I ate most of the butter,” I said.  “I thought you didn’t want any.”  He replied, “Oh, no, I didn’t, I was trying to skip it, but then I decided … fuck it.”  That one particularly evocative word, “fuck,” was the telltale sound of his resolve snapping like a breadstick.

When we make specific, measurable new year’s resolutions, our behavior becomes a binary condition of being on or off the wagon (to borrow a conceit from Alcoholics Anonymous).  We measure ourselves against whether we’re adhering to our goal, and the minute we’re not, we become fatalistic and decide all is lost.  You know:  “fuck it”—and the effort is abandoned.  (Of course we shouldn’t take this attitude; in equating a behavior change with the realities of substance addiction we commit the logical fallacy of false analogy.)

The problem of time

Resolve isn’t the only obstacle to keeping new year’s resolutions.  There’s also the problem of time.  So often, the resolution is to do something you haven’t been—which means finding the time for something that’s never been part of your routine.  Or it means changing behaviors that, whatever their failings may be, are at least convenient or efficient.  I looked at lists of top-ten new year’s resolutions and found seven that involve time.  Get fit, learn something new, spend more time with family, volunteer:  all these are the kinds of things we hope to get to, eventually (i.e., will never get to).  Eat healthier, drink less, be less stressed:  these also take time, in their way.  Healthy food like salads and vegetables take time to prepare.  Drinking is a really quick way for millions of people to relax, and takes far less time than yoga or meditation.  Stress, meanwhile, is so often caused by not having enough time to accomplish everything.

When other people are counting on you, their deadlines feel very real.  Your pet self-improvement project, which nobody else is monitoring, is an easy target for postponement.  And yet, people do manage to get fit, to volunteer, to learn things, and to spend time with their families.  What’s their secret?  Well, I think part of the problem is that we do have the time for these things, but not always when we’re in a position to do them.  I feel like exercising, but it’s dark and/or raining and/or cold outside.  I’d like to do something with my family, but they’re already doing something.  I’d like to read my book, but it’s at home.  So we spend countless hours filling in the time—browsing the web, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc.  It’s not moving us in a useful direction, and it’s not particularly satisfying.

The foolproof, universal new year’s resolution

So you want to know the solution to all this?  Are you ready?  Here it is:

This year, I resolve to spend more time doing things I would like to be better at.

This isn’t going to solve all our problems—we might still drink too much, weigh too much, and/or be too sedentary—but it’s a legitimate resolution that, if followed, will give us small bursts of satisfaction throughout the year.  And look at all the pitfalls it avoids: 

• It’s not negative.  It doesn’t focus on your vices or human failings, so it doesn’t bum you out.
• It has you checking the “blind spot” of missed opportunities—that is, it doesn’t get you so focused on eschewing bad behaviors that you forget to wonder what cool thing you haven’t thought to do.
• It doesn’t ensnare you in over-specific goals that, when missed, cause you to give up and abandon the resolution altogether.
• Rather than becoming a new activity you’ll get to when you can (i.e., never) it’s a lifestyle approach that runs in the background, giving you a way to catch yourself spending your time the wrong way.
• It’s easier to stick with this resolution because it’s not prescriptive—instead of “I’ve been doing something wrong and that’s got to change,” you can do whatever you want and if it’s something you wish you were better at, you’ll be getting somewhere.

Let’s look at an extreme case to see how this resolution might be best applied.  I’ll choose Jim Anchower,  the fictitious loser featured periodically in “The Onion.”  He never gets anywhere because whenever he’s not working, he’s smoking pot and/or drinking beer.  Imagine him asking himself, “Is smoking pot something I’d like to be better at?”  Probably not.  (I suppose there are über-stoners who actually would like to be better at it—“Dude, I’m gonna take a bigger hit than Phelps, and I’m never gonna exhale!” or those who would like to be better at growing weed—but let’s say they’re the exception that proves the rule.)  If Anchower could figure out just one thing he’d like to be better at, I think he’d be in much better shape.

This isn’t to say that this resolution rules out wasting time.  The young, especially, should defend their right to waste time as they see fit—if “waste time” can mean both “accomplishing nothing of importance” and “doing something I’d like to be better at.”  When my brother Max was a young teen, he decided he was going to teach himself how to do a track stand—that is, to be able to balance in one place on a bicycle indefinitely.  It’s not easy to do.  (Of my bike club, fewer than two-thirds of the guys can do a track stand; only eight of us can do a no-handed track stand; and only two—Max and I—can do a downhill track stand.)  Max spent countless hours learning this, wearing out tires and making strange crescent-shaped black marks on the driveway.  Look, decades later he’s still got it:

As he developed his skill, he inspired my brothers and me as well, and taught us the ropes.  Track-standing is a pretty pointless skill, but in the process of learning and refining it we unknowingly knocked off a few classic new year’s resolution favorites:  learning something new, spending more time with family, and getting fit (at least, in terms of balance).

You never know how these random fancies will play out.  Many years ago I read an article in “The New Yorker” about the downhill skier Bode Miller.  His unconventional style and methods, the article explains, paid dividends when the new style of shorter, carving skis came out: 

For athletes steeped in classic technique, [the new skis] took some getting used to.  Miller, though, had never stopped experimenting.  He was used to leaning back on his skis, he had great footwork thanks to tennis and soccer, and his sense of balance improved year after year.  While other skiers sat on exercise bikes, he learned to ride a unicycle.  While they bulked up with weights, he stretched a rope between two trees in his back yard, and practiced tightrope walking.  Two summers ago, Miller spent six weeks logrolling in Wisconsin.  His girlfriend at the time, Lizzie Hoeschler, has been logrolling since childhood and is ranked fourth in the world in the sport.  “It’s very hard to learn as an adult,” she told me.  “It’s just weird to stand on a log that is floating in the water.  But Bode was rolling before too long.”

I don’t get the sense that Miller had a specific goal in mind when learning to logroll, and wasn’t doing it with an eye to improving his skiing.  He was doing it simply because he enjoyed the challenge.

Does this mean than we should all have free reign to spend as much time as we want at any old thing?  Can we, say, play all the video games as we want?  I suppose I should qualify my resolution a bit more:  we should spend time doing things that, ten or twenty years from now, we’ll still be glad we bothered to get good at.  I’m glad I learned how to track-stand as a kid, because I sure wouldn’t make time to learn it now.  As a teen I did spend a fair amount of time playing video games, and I’m less excited now about the time I spent on that.  But I don’t regret it, either, for a couple of reasons.  One, at least I had to ride my bike across town to the arcade and vie for the game machines with other teens; and two, I recognized the point at which gaming had become a habit, as opposed to something I truly wished to be better at.  Over time the awe I had watching the master gamers turned into something more like pity for the countless hours of fanatical devotion they dedicated to it.  So I gave it up.

Creator, vs. consumer, of entertainment

Another way to look at this is whether, in spending your free time, you are a creator of your own entertainment, or just a consumer of ready-made diversions thought up by someone else.  Doing a crossword puzzle is an example of the latter.  I don’t have anything against crosswords; they’re decent mental exercise, and I can see why somebody would like to get better at them—to a point.  But ultimately, there is exactly one solution to the puzzle, so you’re replicating a standard activity.  (I put reading—that is, of good literature—above this, because every reader brings a different experience to the act of reading, and envisions the characters and scenes according to his own imagination.)

Here’s a cool example of creating entertainment even as you consume it.  My nephew John, in his last summer before going to college, decided to get really good at disc golf.  That’s a fine activity by itself, to my mind.  (Though not as intense as my cycling or John’s baseball, it’s pleasant enough recreation.)  But he and his pals decided to take it up a notch and put their own target basket in various hard-to-reach places, and film themselves making amazing shots.  They put together a pretty incredible YouTube video, “Disc Golf Aces and Trick Shots” (click here to watch it!).  Thus they joined creativity to disc golf mastery, spending countless hours on a project as glorious as it was pointless.  Perhaps decades from now they’ll watch that video again and be glad they made time for such frolics when they had the chance.

My resolutions this year

Okay, enough about athletes and teens.  What about some more practical activities, for busy adults?  Like, what is your blogger hoping to spend more time getting better at in 2013?  This year, it’s running (which I still can’t do very well after breaking my leg in late 2011; last year it was relearning how to walk).  I’ll still make time for cycling, having fun, reading great books, and keeping up this blog.  So I’ve got my work cut out for me, and I hope you do too.

Dopamine, Parenting, and Social Media

Introduction

I attended a lecture recently about parenting.  The speaker, a Ph.D. psychologist, talked a lot about biological factors such as neurotransmitters; specifically, about how motivating children can often be a contest between the parents’ goals for the child and the various dopamine sources available to him.  Put more simply, it’s really hard to get a kid to do his homework when he’s engrossed in a movie, video game, or the Internet.  “Just a sec” is the kid’s equivalent of the snooze button.

Another thread of the lecture involved the ways evolving society is making it even harder for kids to focus on activities like schoolwork, given the new distractions facing them, like texting and social media.  In addition to traditional sources of dopamine (e.g., calorie-dense food, booze, drugs) the lecturer mentioned “social commerce,” which she described as the kind of widespread but shallow interactions offered by sites like Facebook and Twitter.  These interactions, she declared, produce more dopamine than the deeper connections with close friends and family.

In this post I examine the intersection of dopamine, social media, and kids.  Whether or not you ultimately agree with my observations and philosophies, perhaps I’ll help you to ponder some good questions.

Dopamine and me

Dopamine isn’t happiness, and doesn’t lead to happiness.  It is the neurotransmitter most associated with pleasure.  From an evolutionary perspective, its job was to motivate the kind of behavior—e.g., eating as much calorie-dense food as possible—that would increase the chances of survival.  (If cavemen ate like supermodels, the human race wouldn’t have made it.)  Dopamine production is stimulated also by sex, novelty, high risk activities, rest, and sleep—anything ancient man needed to survive.  In modern society, dopamine is also produced by winning (and its illusory cousins like scoring in a video game), shopping, passive entertainment like TV, and even TV ads (which provide novelty and, I suppose, the notion of hope).

Personally, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with dopamine.  “Love” because hey, what’s not to love about pleasure?  Hate because I’ve experienced how dopamine can manipulate me.  As a teenager, especially during the year after my parents’ divorce, I got pretty heavily into TV, recording some pretty stupid programs and watching them all afternoon after school.  I felt glutted by cheap spectacle but was too lazy to figure out something better to do.  To this day I’m easily mesmerized by TV, as is my wife; our solution is to eschew it entirely (i.e., we don’t have cable, nor an antenna).  Occasionally we’ll go on a video binge, renting five or six episodes of, say, “30 Rock” and watching them over the course of an evening or two.

I’m similarly wary of caffeine.  As an impressionable youth I remember my dad getting almost panicky during a road trip due to caffeine withdrawal.  He explained, as we took an off-ramp to a convenience store, that if he didn’t have coffee every two hours he got a splitting headache.  I found this really disturbing, and as an adult I still prefer not to be beholden to caffeine (or any substance).  Don’t get me wrong:  I love the way caffeine makes me feel—but I also fear how it can enable us to deprive ourselves of sleep.  Meanwhile, I’m as cheap as they come and refuse to pay for Starbucks, fancy beans, all the equipment, etc.  So I use No-Doz, and only before bike rides.

Beyond these practical matters, I have an ideological problem with dopamine:  it makes me feel cheap—a slave to my most basic desires, like a lab hamster hammering a button to get food pellets.  The craving for something is base; the will power to resist this craving feels, to me, more evolved.  (Yes, I’m aware that though I am not a hamster in an experiment, I may yet resemble the dog trained to resist eating the milk-bone balanced on its snout until the master gives the okay.  Except that I am both the dog and the master.  My discipline is of a sort Don DeLillo has aptly described:  “You are making your own little totalitarian society ... where you are the dictator, absolutely, and also the oppressed people.”)

My neurotransmitter of choice?  Endorphins.  These I must earn, and getting them never feels like a failure of discipline.  So many desserts are advertized as “guilt-free”—note that there’s no need to construct the notion of a guilt-free workout.  But this isn’t just an ego thing.  Endorphins are simply more powerful.  If dopamine tells the brain, “that was nice,” endorphins offer actual exhilaration.

Dopamine and kids

Self-control such as I’ve just described is largely unavailable to kids.  I have often pondered how my own daughters—little angels though they may be—often seem a manifestation of pure appetite.  I’ll give you an example.  My younger daughter, when she was about four years old, got too much chocolate on Easter.  During the drive home from her grandma’s she hurled in the car.  A week or two later, at a birthday party, she asked if she could have a second “muffin.”  (She meant “cupcake,” but having never seen one before she thought it was just the tastiest damn muffin she’d ever had.)  I said to her, “No, that would be too much sugar.  Remember that giant chocolate rabbit you ate on Easter?  Do you really want to throw up like that again?”  She thought about this for a couple seconds and replied, “Yes!  Yes I do!”

Advertisers take full advantage of this unbridled desire, and peddle appalling things like sugary cereals directly to kids, harnessing the youngsters’ amazing whining power.  Advertisers push especially hard on teenagers, taking advantage of the awful combination of spending money and the lack of a fully formed prefrontal cortex (the seat of restraint and good judgment).  There’s another reason my family doesn’t have cable TV:  commercials.  I refuse to go toe-to-toe with the great evil advertising minds.  It’s much easier to remove the temptation than to fight it.

So it is with the ice cream truck.  You may think of this truck as a standard part of childhood, something you may even feel nostalgia for.  Not me.  In my book, the ice cream man is a terrorist.  My brothers and I would be happily playing with friends, and then we’d heard the music of the approaching truck, and the play would be forgotten as our friends would run inside and beg their moms for money—a fusillade of relentless pleading—and then, money in hand, they’d tear out into the street toward that truck as though their lives depended on it.  Then they’d eat their overpriced ice cream in front of my brothers and me as the truck drove on, seeding unrest through every neighborhood in its path.

Am I just bitter, envious to have missed out?  No, that’s not it.  Even as a kid I had found it a disgusting spectacle, from beginning to end.  Fast-forward a couple of decades:  the first time, as a parent, that I heard the ice cream truck coming, I launched a preemptive strike:  “Run to the windows, girls!” I cried.  “It’s the music truck!”  Fascinated, my daughters asked me what it was all about.  “He just drives around, playing music for kids,” I said.  After two or three years of this, my older daughter said, “Hey!  He’s not just playing music, he’s selling ice cream!”  I casually replied, “Yeah, well, that too.”  She fired back, “Can I have some money?”  I said, “Absolutely not, ever.  Don’t even ask.”

Dopamine and social media

It’s all well and good to make fun of kids and their cravings, but adults are pretty good at facilitating their own dopamine production:  faster, sportier cars; premium tequila and countless new microbrews; ever-fancier coffee beans and grinders and home espresso makers; clever ways to introduce dopamine into exercise, like heart rate monitors and Strava; and, to an explosive degree, social media.

To reiterate, social media serves a different role than close friends and family.  Close relationships are probably more closely associated with serotonin; in any event, they aren’t the same thing as social commerce.  When a person from your past comes out of nowhere and “friends” you, showing that he or she hasn’t forgotten about you and wants to get back in touch, that’s got to feel good.  I reckon that each time somebody posts something to your wall, you get a little dopamine hit.  I googled “facebook dopamine” and right away found an essay describing how the dopamine produced by social media is so powerful as to be addictive.  This essay cites a study of how often, and in what contexts, people are stopping what they’re doing to check in on their social media sites.  For example, 34% of those under 35 actually admit to doing this during a date.  (We could almost infer from this that social media offers more dopamine than sex, because after all, who’s going to get lucky after being so unconscionably rude to his date?)

I am not above this quasi-addiction.  It kind of crept up on me.  In general, I’ve had a policy of avoiding social networks like Facebook and Twitter.  As much as anything this stems from a “New Yorker” cartoon I saw way back in 1997:  a man sits at a computer, and his little daughter, in her pajamas holding a teddy bear, taps him on the shoulder; he says, “Honey, please don’t talk to Daddy when he’s in a chat room.”  Such a prescient cartoon, anticipating the bizarre epidemic of people ignoring those around them in favor of a burst of off-the-cuff text from an unseen correspondent.  (The comic comeuppance continues in the “New Yorker” here and here.)

I will acknowledge that I’ve enjoyed Twitter occasionally, following professional cyclists.  There is sometimes a refreshing unguarded quality to athletes’ tweets, particularly when their competition-induced neurotransmitters are still firing away.  (In fact, one team has instituted a one-hour moratorium on all post-race tweets from its riders.)  But I can’t dish it out:  I am certain that nothing in my life warrants a blow-by-blow of my activities, and it would be a bored person indeed who would bother to read them.  Moreover, I think every tweet is a partial lie.  Why?  Because whatever you claim to be doing, you’re actually doing that plus tweeting.  If I were to tweet, “I’m hanging out with my kids,” and you were able to ask my kids what I was doing at that moment, they’d say, “Playing with his phone.”

Where dopamine has gotten hold of me through social media is through this very blog.  When I conceived of albertnet, my goal was simply to write little essays and stories and have some sort of audience, however small or random.  It was never my goal to have a reciprocal communication with anybody, and for the first couple years it was almost impossible to know who, if anybody, was reading my blog.  Occasionally somebody would post a comment, or e-mail me about a post, but that was, and is, exceedingly rare—which is fine.  I’m not trying to “deliver an audience,” but to write whatever I want and if someone reads it, great.  I joked about my readership apprehension and “screw the reader” philosophy in a post a couple years ago:  “Where this blog is concerned, ‘screw the reader’ may end up meaning ‘screw exactly one reader’ (sorry Mom).”

But then, some months ago, a wealth of statistics suddenly became available to me.  Now, I can look at pageviews for the last day, week, month, and all-time.  I can see who is reading what posts at this very moment.  I can see where in the world they hail from, and I can see how they found my post.  (Sometimes the search terms are very funny; one hit on my vasectomy post was a search on the phrase “will vasectomy make my testicles droop.”  Sometimes the search terms are flattering, like the search on “albertnet suffering cold-pressor test,” clearly from a repeat viewer.) 

What I discovered is that this blog is more popular than I had ever thought (though it’s entirely possible pageviews represent Google misfires rather than people actually reading my posts).  Now I find myself tracking the pageviews of every new post.  Whenever that number is higher than I expected, or just higher than it was yesterday, I get a little hit of dopamine.  I must be, because I have come to find this activity oddly compelling, in the way that beating your old score at a video game is compelling.  That is, in that dopamine-glutted way that starts to make me feel like a loser.  I’m strongly considering swearing off pageview viewing altogether, or strictly rationing it.  But I’m not sure I have the will power.

Dopamine + kids + social media

Consider that I, an annoyingly disciplined person, distrustful of dopamine response, and with a fully-formed prefrontal cortex, am all but addicted to Blogger pageview stats—probably the least compelling of all social media.  How, then, can a teenager even stand a chance against it?  Here is a source of dopamine that many, if not most, teenagers have unlimited access to.  It doesn’t cost money, they’re not going to get carded, and in many cases their parents give them carte blanche, assuming access to social media is as innocuous, ubiquitous, and mainstream as running water or electricity.

And yet, sites like Facebook strike me as a social minefield for teenagers in particular.  I’ve heard enough about adults offending one another, embarrassing themselves, wishing they hadn’t friended somebody, wondering how to extract themselves, etc.  And these are the people who have presumably learned how to get along—at least, who should be closer to social poise than they were in junior high.  As the writer Lore Segal has written (in a telegram sent by one of her characters), “'PROTOCOL IS THE ART OF NOT REPEAT NOT LIVING BY NATURAL HUMAN FEELING.”  This protocol is far beyond the grasp of the average teenager.  Isn’t the hormone-ravaged teen existence hard enough without a constantly evolving online social world?  Probably the worst aspect of social media is that it takes those terribly embarrassing teen moments that , a generation ago, would have faded into distant memory, and makes them permanent.

I’m grateful that the sudden rise of social media has taken place before my own kids are really old enough to participate.  This is giving my wife and me a chance to figure out, in advance, a family Internet acceptable use policy.  It probably sounds like I’m joking and I admit that phrase sounds corny, but I’m serious.  It’s very tempting to assume that anything involving technology is good for our kids.  Parents brag about it:  “I can’t figure out how to set up a new printer, but my ten-year-old is a whiz at it!”  People talk of “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants,” and a parent could be excused for believing that facility with computers and the Internet might make his or her child the next Mark Zuckerberg. But this idea is actually pretty absurd. I recently read a newspaper article about an expensive private school in the Silicon Valley that bans computers and other high-tech gadgets; one of the parents, a Google employee with a computer science degree, reminds us that computers and related technologies are designed to be idiot-proof: “It’s super easy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. ”

In other words, facility with computers doesn’t say much about a young person’s intelligence or career prospects; the ability to consume any technology has little do to with creating it. To put it another way, your kid isn’t going to be the next great food scientist just because he enjoys eating at McDonald’s.  So my strategy as a parent is to restrict my kids' access to computers and other passive entertainment sources in favor of books and other traditional kid stuff. 

Meanwhile, there's the issue of security. After taking great pains to put our kids in a good school and thus surround them with good peers, my wife and I aren’t about to let them roam the great untamable Internet unheeded.  In the context of the Internet, the movie ratings system seems kind of quaint; if you had to rate the Internet as a whole, it would have to be X—but there’s no ticket taker to turn kids away.  What’s to keep kids from unknowingly corresponding with wackos, and/or stumbling on images they come to wish they hadn’t?

Meanwhile, Internet gaming runs from the educational to the merely time-wasting to the hideously violent; why should I let my kids decide what’s appropriate?  (At least they’re both girls.)  I let my older daughter play two kinds of games:  those specifically assigned in school, and those that teach her the Dvorak keyboard layout.  Nothing else is even on the table.  Even if they found suitable games, I’m not about to allow them, because video games are addictive—they create a dopamine-fueled drive for bigger scores, driving a compulsion to play without any legitimate reward.  I am not just speculating.  I was a videot myself as a teenager (though at least then I had to ride my bike across town and compete for gaming machines with other non-virtual youths).

Parents I’ve talked to have responded to this approach by saying, “Won’t depriving your kids just create a pent-up demand, and cause them to rebel and go too far in the opposite direction?” Perhaps—but I’m betting it won’t. In my household videos are severely restricted (if I had to put our policy in words it would go something like “In general you may not watch them, though we’ll make exceptions as we see fit”). Here, my younger daughter cleverly tried to get permission for a video while my wife was on the phone. It was a good strategy ... maybe next time it’ll actually work.



Has this policy created an outsized craving for videos? Not really—my daughters love watching them, but their expectations are realistic and they don’t often hassle my wife and me about it. For example: the other evening my older daughter put in a video. (She’d cleared it with her mom.) I was happy to watch with her and her sister because, as I’ve described before, I do enjoy some good lowbrow entertainment and the movie was “Monsters Vs. Aliens.” Imagine my surprise when, after ten or fifteen minutes, my daughter abruptly turned it off and said, “I have to practice piano.” Equally shocking was that her little sister took this in stride.

What about older kids?  When my daughters are teenagers, will I let them have Facebook or Google Plus accounts?  I’m conflicted on that one.  Part of me wants to say “no,” and the other part of me wants to say “hell, no.”  Will they get these accounts anyway, behind my back?  Possibly.  But at least they won’t have smartphones to stare into—on that point my wife and I are firmly resolved.  Part of this is selfish:  when I’m with my kids, I want them to engage with me, not think of me as mere background static as they pour their attention into a handheld electronic device.  It’s bad enough when their noses are in books and I can’t get their attention; at least reading is something I can share with them, rather than having them look down upon me as a dopey old person on the wrong side of the digital divide.  (The smartphone may be the most sophisticated parental-estrangement device ever created; click here for details.)  And who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and three years from now the social media revolution will have fizzled, like disco, breakdancing, and the Macarena.

But wait, you might say, the Internet is so cool, and opens up such a wide world of worthwhile stuff, and social media enables your kids to connect with friends even when they can’t get together in person!  What’s wrong with that?  What kind of deprivation-obsessed fascist are you?  What are you gonna do, send your ten-year-old outside by herself to blow bubbles with the little party-favor wand from her sister’s birthday?  No, we don’t keep that junk around.  Check this out:

I’d researched how to make my own bubble mix at home, but it looked complicated and I needed glycerin and where would I find that?  And yet, my daughter somehow figured out how to make the best bubble solution I’ve ever seen, so robust you don’t even need a wand.  It’s amazing how resourceful a kid can be when she doesn’t have anything “better” (i.e., easier) to do.