Will Self: PsychoGeography #118

The best way of reducing my children to hysterical and bemused laughter is to take them to the Science Museum in London, specifically to the basement. For down in the bowels of the building, there is an exhibition of domestic technology. Here are those gas fires, with peculiar coral-like elements, that whiffled through childhoods of those of us over 40. Here are cavernous, cracked commodes and Hoovers that resemble a motorcycle engine lashed to a bolster. I find all of it entrancing: an eight track stereo player or an Unwin typewriter can yank me into a nostalgic reverie far more effectively than any text or celluloid. But that's not why I bring the kids here - I bring them for Ping.

Ping was the first video game that I can recall. Plugged into your television it presented you with two white lines - the bats, and a single white dot, which, when "hit" by them, streaked luminescence across the dark screen. The crude controls allowed you to raise and lower the bats, thus emulating - in a way that, at the time, seemed devastatingly lifelike - a ping-pong game. The children stare at Ping with gaping mouths, and even though they've seen it before, the notion that this constituted both a viable entertainment and a leap into virtual space, manages to convince them anew that I was raised in the Dark Ages wearing an off-the-peg doublet.

I don't need to tell the older kids about Space Invaders, the "lumpa-lumpa" sound of which punctuated a good year of my university career. This video game is an acknowledged classic, and versions of it are available on contemporary computers, games consoles and even mobile phones. It's a quaint curiosity - the rock'n'roll revival of the digital age. However, I can't possibly convey to these tiny sophisticates how compelling the game was to the neophyte. How you actually felt yourself to be sheltering beneath the friable masonry as it crumbled under the alien onslaught; how with each new level the insistent "lumpa-lumpa" jacked your adrenaline levels up to new heights, and you found yourself haplessly entombed in a two-dimensional world far realer than the surrounding public bar.

Space Invaders was pretty much the end of my own video-gaming. I tried Pac Man, but found it altogether too jazzy, with its whizzing, jabbering, gobbling agglomerations of coloured pixels. I gave up on virtual space and spent the next decade tilting at the windmills of my mind. When I encountered games again they were my own children's portals into virtuality. With the older ones these were acceptably crude walkways, up and up, down and along. Their eyeballs tracked in lockstep with twin endomorphic, mustachioed Italians: the Super Mario Brothers.

At least these games were mostly played on GameBoys, those handheld little slabs of alternate reality that were to the 1990s what slates were to the 1890s. No matter how aggressive their peeping and pinging it was possible to ignore them, to not engage. I resolved that I would not "do" computer games with the children, along with theme parks and dental hygiene. But all good resolves - like unbrushed teeth and earthling dwellings - eventually crumble. My eight-year-old's zeal for computer games is so consuming that I have been forced to follow his quivering form into the binary undergrowth, lest he become irretrievably lost in the twitch of the toggles and the press of the buttons.

And what a curious place this virtual world is. Of course, I'm wasn't completely ignorant of what contemporary gaming is like - I read The Independent, I've heard of Grand Theft Auto. Yet it's a different experience when you pick up the controls. Somewhat forlornly imagining that the new PlayStation 2 game Narnia would, like its papery precursor, be an egregious Christian allegory, I bought it and resolved that I would play it with the lad.

Only to discover that it's a bashing, slashing, zapping headlong tilt through a wintry world of savage dwarfs, trolls and wolves. True, the saccharine quartet of children look credible, but instead of focusing on the nature of good, they all seem intent on kicking the shit out anything they encounter. I find this particularly gnawing, because one thing does work for me, and that is the 3-D world on-screen. I've discovered what every computer gamer has long known: that once you take to the controls, you shrink and become as one with your on-screen alter-ego. How nice it would be - I muse as I frantically twiddle - to step aside and wander away down that avenue of pines, or across those snowy wastes. Who knows what might be around that rocky outcrop?

I'll never discover, because my fellow-gamer yanks me inexorably in his train; the young, blinded by science, leading the old Luddite by the nose. Ah! The game of life.

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