Ralph Baer receives the National Medal of Technology, November 2006
As a child in a relatively poor family, I often found myself behind the loop. When Nintendo games first came out, I had just received a used Atari system. Which was already starting to be outdated. Although I still enjoyed playing Frogger, Space Invaders, and Asteriods, the more powerful digital graphics of the Nintendo slowly ate away at my interest in the old system. I spent hours in a friend’s basement mastering Techmo Bowl football, only to finally get my own Nintendo just as the next generation – the Super Nintendo – came on the market. Soon after that, I lost interest in gaming all together, and essentially forgot the inferiority complex I had developed around gaming. Until today. When I read about the death of Ralph Baer, inventor of the first video game console back in the late 1960s.
Although I spent large amounts of time outdoors as a child and teenager, it’s still the case that Baer, and others, had a profound effect on my early days. When I look around today, witnessing how obsessed the majority of kids are with gaming and screens in general, I wonder if this is the kind of outcome folks like Baer would have wanted. The need for connecting (and reconnecting for us older folks) with the Earth is so great now, and yet here so many of us are, sucked into a virtual world of games so elaborate that you could lose entire lifetimes in them.
Ralph Baer lived almost a century. As a child, he witnessed the downfall of phonographs, as they were replaced with more modern record players. Along with that, the rise of radio, with its amazing ability to spread news and stories across space and time. It wasn’t long before the television moved from experimental form to the ubiquitous object found in households everywhere. And on the heels of that, not long after he invented the first gaming console, came the home computer.
And yet, like my experience with gaming systems, the movement of all these electronics was clearly a class-based affair. Poorer families either lived without or spent far too much of their hard earned money to just keep up with the entertainment habits of middle and upper class folks. With each step, there has been a corresponding pattern of centering life (or at least the leisure part of it) around the use of the next new system. And along with that came a movement of challenge to resist that centering often out of fear of losing family and community connections.
When I was 5 or 6 years old, I remember bonding with my grandfather over a text based adventure game on an early home computer. Like Baer, he was a techie type long before that was hip. He worked on the old building sized supercomputers, and spent a fair amount of his free time taking apart, and putting back together, old radios and television sets. He was so proud of that home computer, and so excited that such a thing had even been made. I can only imagine how amazed he would be at today’s generation of computers.
I tend to think that society as a whole needs a bit of a course correction when it comes to technology and how it influences our lives. What that means exactly, I don’t know for sure. I’m not a Luddite, and even if I were, I don’t see that as realistic. In fact, I rather like that I can type my articles on a laptop and send them via the internet to be published by a web-journal based in another country. And even though the lag in upgrade time between systems caused me much grief as a child, I still like those old games I used to play.
And so, a hat tip to Ralph Baer. Who lived a life of tinkering with machines and inventing that helped shaped a slice of the modern world.
Photo Credit:
Ralph Baer via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
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