Joystick Nation?

Joystick Nation: How Video Games Ate Our
Quarters, Won our Hearts and Rewired Our Minds
By J.C. Herz (Little, Brown and Company

By 1975 Gordon Moore, a founder of computer-chip maker Intel, had predicted that chip power would double every 18 months. He was right, which is why that equation is now referred to as Moore's Law. According to J.C. Herz's Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, by J.C. Herz, 1975 falls in “The Pong Era.” If you remember Pong, and if you've caught a glimpse of Doom or Quake, you would probably agree that the sophistication of computer games has grown at a pace comparable to Moore's Law. It's hard to believe that any Pong player back then could have guessed that this simplistic little pastime was an early step toward the creation of a $6 billion industry devoted to the creative blowing of minds.

In Joystick Nation, Herz sets out to make some sense of the video game phenomenon, laying out the history, introducing us to various industry players, and sharing her own experiences as a self-proclaimed child of the video game era. (She's 25.) Part of her goal, she explains, is “to trace the evolution of videogames from blips to behemoths.”

Well, that sounds like fun. And as it turns out, much of Joystick Nation is precisely the entertaining romp you'd expect, particularly if you're more or less in Herz's demographic. (I am.) Chapter two, my favorite, consists of an extended timeline: from the Atari 2600 and the rise of the mall arcade to the Nintendo 64 and multiplayer contests on the Internet. We also meet the kinds of characters you would expect a profitable subculture to produce-the people who conceive the games, write their musical stores, publish magazines about them, even “play-test” games for a living. “You can come in looking like a wreck, reeking of booze, whatever, and they're never gonna fire you for it, because they need you,” offers Alex Tschetter, an ex-construction worker with a mohawk, earrings, tattoos, and enough talent as a game artist to know what he's talking about.

Herz herself is a little less compelling. In her first book, Surfing on the Internet: A Nethead's Adventures on Line, she made a gonzo-style run through the World Wide Web, interacting with virtual drag queens and so forth. This time around her presence is primarily as a vessel for nostalgia. “Arcades demanded attention,” she reminisces. “They were dark. There was a whiff of challenge and danger and sweat in the air.” Chronicling the corruption of these romantic oases into brightly-lit family fun centers thick with Skee-Ball machines, Herz gets positively maudlin — embarrassing even by the standards of twentysomething nostalgia. Unfortunately, this gravity is symptomatic of a bigger problem with Joystick Nation, falling in the second part of Herz's agenda: “to trace [videogames'] radiation into our patterns of thought.”

Now that doesn't sound like fun, and in fact the book never really recovers from a bad case of taking itself too seriously. “Videogames are perfect training for life in fin de siècle America,” Herz declares. “Those to the joystick born have a built-in advantage.” C. Everett Koop is criticized. Beowolf is cited. Gender questions are addressed. An unpublished Ph.D. thesis is quoted. The Rand Corporation comes up. Pop culture references proliferate ( “to paraphrase Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. ..,” “to paraphrase the Red Dog beer motto. . . ,” “to paraphrase Christian Slater in True Romance. . . .”). Even Moore's Law is invoked.

If all of that isn't annoying enough, Herz resorts to the same combination of “attitude” and breathless philosophizing that pop culture critics use when they're trying to hoodwink you into thinking that they're academics. “What is Space Invaders?” she asks. “Is it the code? Is it the arcade cabinet? . . . Where is the actual game? As we move into the thingless digital society, we have to confront issues like this, which seem to crop up with disturbing frequency as chunks of content are bent, beamed, and repurposed into one storage medium after another. With videogames, these questions are particularly messy, because these retro artifacts were digital from the get-go.”

Right. On the other hand, who cares? It's too bad that Herz — who can write both smartly and amusingly — meandered off in this direction. I suspect that she fell victim to a Moore's Law variation that seems be shaping pop culture analysis: the attribution of greater and greater significance to more and more marginal trends. If Prozac, talk shows, and sitcom reruns reveal “who we are,” then who's to say videogames haven't “rewired our minds?” No wonder Herz didn't want to settle for something that was merely an enjoyable read. But in the end, the effort to turn it into something more just produced a lot of strained writing and silly thinking. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a joystick is just a joystick.

This review appeared in the July 6, 1997 edition of Newsday.