Fun & Games
Seattle Seahawks’ running back Shaun Alexander takes the pitch and rumbles to the outside.
He sheds a tackler, spins, and is hauled down after a six-yard gain.
The camera zooms in. Sweat glistens on his arm. The scar on his chin is visible under his helmet.
And Randy Lore controls his every movement.
Lore is not his agent or his coach, but an 11-year-old boy from Butler. And Alexander is cyber-Alexander — a collection of pixels in a video game playing out on a big-screen television in Lore’s living room.
“I’m going to win,” Lore said confidently. His opponents on “Madden 06” — the undisputed king of the computer-rendered gridiron — are the St. Louis Rams and his father, Chris.
Like the board games of the previous generation, the video game console is providing the Lores and many other families with quality time.
Video games are not just the sole realm of geeks anymore.
“It’s awesome,” Chris said, this time holding Alexander to a short loss on a fourth-and-inches play. “When we can, we play as much as we can. It’s an excellent bonding experience.”
Randy agreed, nodding as his defense takes the field. “I think it’s great.”
Chris Lore is 33 years old and is part of a generation that has grown up with the video game as a big part of life.He spent his formative years across the street from his home in a pizza parlor arcade, learning the ins and outs of the games and even how to repair the mammoth machines.Later, he owned an Atari and was hooked on the usual games of the time: “Pong,” “Space Invaders” and “Asteroids.”“I spent most of the time when I was 12 until I was 14 in an arcade,” Chris said. “Then I discovered the home consoles.”Now, Chris has a virtual museum of gaming machines with the crown jewel being the Xbox 360, the latest in a long line of gaming machines released to the masses.In his gaming arsenal, he has a Sega Genesis, a Colecovision, four PlayStation 2 consoles, three original Xbox consoles, a GameCube and three PlayStation Portables.And there are no lengths too far to snag a primo machine.When the Xbox 360 was released by Microsoft in late November, there was a shortage of units.Despite his better judgement, Chris did not reserve the system at a gaming store.“If they told me once, they told me 1,000 times, ‘You should reserve it; you should reserve it,’” Chris said. “I said, ‘Nah.’”But he wanted it for his two sons for Christmas, so he paid a woman $550 to sleep outside of a retail store the night before the Xbox 360 was released to get the system.“It was worth it,” he said.
To Randy Lore, 11, and his younger brother Jordan, video games have been a common household item, right along with the refrigerator and stove.They don’t know life without it.But Jordan has embraced the games of the past more than the games of the future.He is fascinated with the birth of video games and leafs through a hardback, illustrated book about the early years of the video game as he talks.“I like to see what the video games of the past were like, so I can see how that can be used to make better games in the future,” he said.Jordan is only 10, but he knows someday he would like to design games.He has already written letters to video game makers, inquiring about the process.“His mind is unbelievable what he comes up with,” Chris said.Jordan looks up at the big-screen TV and sees Marc Bulger toss a perfect cyber pass to Isaac Bruce in the end zone for a score, then glanced down at a picture of the original “Pong” game.“I wonder when I am older if I will look at that,” he said, pointing to the game on the television, “and think of it as that,” he continues, pointing to the picture of “Pong.”In just 20 years, the detail and quality of video games have grown exponentially — for the good and for the bad.“A trend I have noticed over the last couple of years is the games are really, really getting a lot more mature,” said Chuck Nulph, manager at EB Games in Butler. “Just in general, games have gotten so mature in the last couple of years. There’s a lot of street life themes, crime themes.”That puts kids like Randy and Jordan at risk. But not as long as parents like Chris and his wife Rachel are on the scene.Chris closely watches what kinds of games his children play.One of the most controversial games to hit stores is “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” which is strictly off limits in the Lore household.Chris, though, does not believe video games are rotting the minds of this generation.“I’ll be 100 percent honest with you, I don’t buy any of that crap,” Chris said. “You know what, if you take care of your kids, if you treat your kids right, if you teach them what’s going on, I think video games have their place.“I don’t think a kid is going to play a video game and go blow someone’s head off because they did it in a game, unless that’s the environment they are growing up in.”Jordan has a firm grasp of what is reality and what isn’t.“I like video games because I get to do things I ordinarily don’t get to do,” he said.
Pat Sellers is the coolest grandmother in the world.At least her grandkids think so.That’s because Sellers, 59, is an avid gamer.Sellers, who lives in Cherry Valley, owns a GameCube and frequents video game stores.And she knows her stuff.“She comes in and is quite knowledgeable,” Nulph said. “You don’t expect that. She’s not your typical gamer-type.Sellers laughs at the concept for being the coolest grandmother in the world. She certainly knows her way around a controller.When her grandkids — John, 8, Megan, 13, and Ashley, 17 — visit, she challenges them to a game of “Animal Crossing” or “Mario Party” — two of the most popular and kid-friendly games on the Nintendo system.She also dabbles with games when her grandchildren aren’t around.“I’ll play a game and when my grandchildren come over, I’ll ask them, ‘I got a new game, would they like to play it?’” Sellers said. “Sometimes they will, but sometimes our tastes are different.”Sellers has been keeping up with gaming for quite some time now.She owned an Odyssey — the first home video console ever released to the masses — a Nintendo 64 and a GameBoy Advance before buying a GameCube several years ago. She also owns a Nintendo DS (dual screen handheld).Sellers is also wary of what kinds of games she plays and lets her grandchildren play.“I don’t want to teach them violence,” she said.She also doesn’t consider herself unique, even though in the world of video gaming, she certainly is not the norm.“I’ve been told that,” she said.
There are those out there who qualify as the quintessential gamer.Joe Pinskey is one of them. Joe, a 23-year-old from Butler, has worked in the industry and is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to everything gaming.He has owned virtually every gaming system that has ever been released and still goes back in time and plays some of the original games on those archaic systems of yesteryear.He claims to have played more than 1,000 games in his young life — and has enjoyed every minute of it.“To me, games are an escape from reality,” he said. “If a game isn’t taking me someplace else and letting me forget about reality, there is no reason playing it.”But Pinskey is more than just a casual gamer. He dissects the games and the industry as a whole with a keen eye.That’s why he digs deep into his arsenal of games, picking out classics and games that perhaps no one has ever heard of.His favorite game is “Skies of Arcadia,” a little known and widely forgotten-about game on a widely forgotten-about gaming system, the Dreamcast, released by Sega in 1999.“That’s the only game I have played through twice,” he said.Pinskey holds particular disdain for people who label gamers geeks because of what they do in their spare time.“To me, it’s no different than any other hobby,” he said. “That’s all it is. People complain about kids playing all the time, calling them nerds or geeks and how they can’t get girls. But would they rather them do drugs?“I’d rather be a geek with no life than doing something stupid. Gaming is like watching a movie, except you are the actor.”Students at Butler High School have been acting out their own movies for years now.It’s a common practice for students to leave school for the day, return home and log on to Xbox Live — an Internet gaming online service — and connect with the friends they just left.Several years ago, Butler had a video gamers club.“You get out of school, you go right to your Xbox, turn it on and you are playing with all your friends,” said Butler senior Jace Lumley. “It’s very big at Butler. It’s been going on for years now.”Lumley and his friends would also hold LAN parties, linking PCs or gaming machines via a local area network.Herb Klann, also a senior at Butler, is one of those gaming junkies.He has also written to gaming companies to get a better understanding of the inner workings of the industry and is contemplating making gaming a profession.His earliest memory of video games was as a 5-year-old, and he hasn’t stopped since. He said gaming at Butler High School is a big thing.“I’d say probably a little more than half play video games on a regular basis,” he said. “That’s a lot when you consider there are 1,300 kids in my school. It adds up.”Klann is not concerned with the criticism of kids going into their rooms alone to play video games over the Internet when they could just as easily do that with the friend in the room in the flesh.“You have a headset, so you are talking to him,” Klann said. “I see no difference.”
The biggest challenge to the future of video games — and the gamers themselves — may be a concept popularized by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori.In his robotic research, he discovered humans tend to empathize with machines the more humanlike they became. But at a certain point, when the robot became too human, the emotional sympathy abruptly ended and turned to revulsion.Instead of noticing the charming human characteristics of the robot, humans began to notice the creepy zombie-like differences.That has already begun to happen in the world of video games. As the characters in the game become more lifelike, there is a revulsion that is taking place.Pinskey is one of them.He is dismayed by what gaming has become and is particularly concerned about the future.“The decline in quality has really bothered me,” he said. “I remember playing “Halo” for the Xbox and getting so excited and saying, ‘Wow!’ Nothing has done that for me lately.’”It’s the “Uncanny Valley” principal that may be the biggest obstacle of video games these days.That’s why Pinskey finds comfort in his older games, playing them and replaying them.There is good news, however. The “Uncanny Valley” principle tends to fade away as the robots evolve and take on even more lifelike qualities.No one really knows how far gaming will go, but judging by the progress in the last 20 years, the sky is the limit.There is one thing for certain. Gaming is here to stay and just as families shared a game of “Sorry” or “Life” or “Monopoly” in the previous generation, this one is embracing the cyber world.Chris and his family have a gaming night, much like families did with those board games of years past.That’s something that will never change, he said.“We will always do it,” Chris said. “It’s a way to stay connected to the family, and that’s the most important thing.”
