There's no doubt about it. Kids these days, particularly relatively privileged ones, can do amazing things when it comes to home tech. One two-year-old I know casually attained level three of the Naziblasting maze game, Wolfenstein - until his father pulled him off the chair and tried to distract him with, eh, real plastic guns and Power Ranger dolls. A nine-year-old (piece of human vermin) took less than two minutes recently to wipe four months' work off my hard drive (looking for games in "My Computer", he expertly flailed the mouse, randomly dropping menus and clicking options like a pro). I was talking to an engineer in Panasonic, who still has problems programming his own VCR. "Yeah," he grumped, "sure, my kids can do it - but that's because there's nothing else in their heads. I mean, they don't have to worry about making a living."
Well, pops, maybe it's better to let them play, particularly if you heed the claims made in a breathless new technophile-culture book, Joystick Nation written by J.C. Herz. This is an irreverent "natural history" of video games in America, which cites dubious reports that there is a positive correlation between hours spent game-playing and academic performance - and holds that video games, contrary to fears of toddler brain-rot, actually arm kids for the deluge of adult-fuddling new technology just around the millennial corner.
If "convergence" and digital TV seem to be a long time coming, the Internet certainly sees the rippling of product across what we once called the "phoneline". Online gaming is now commonplace, certainly since the watershed of Doom - the ultimate cult space-horror nuke-'em-up - which launched itself on-line in December 1993 by releasing the first two episodes as shareware from the University of Wisconsin mainframe. Over 48 hours, the entire computer crashed repeatedly as 15 million disembodied somebodies went for it in an electronic stampede.
It's one of a number of anecdotes - many of them mouldy chestnuts in videogame lore - relayed in this cheery, journalistic take on a multi-billion dollar industry which is both creating and chasing after a cyber-Chomsky kiddie culture/market in which the glass teat - in Harlan Ellison's immortal characterisation of the telly - has become a toothsome joypad.
As this book episodically relates, game production is now like that of Hollywood movies: designed by teams of management, marketing wings, writers, artists, action programmers, virtual architects, virtual fitters and decorators, composers and music code-writers - a whole virtual construction boom which has seen spin-offs even in this country.
More often than not, the production budget comes in at something like $2 million for a major release - a promotional budget of $10 million (about which Nintendo boasts more than the game itself). In the industry, job descriptions have radically narrowed, and all the majors are in there: Sony, Philips, Toshiba; phone companies such as AT & T; cable companies; and conglomerates such as Disney and Dreamworks - all hooked up in a tangled web of investments with Sega, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics . . . very big business for something often dismissed as child'splay.
But the gut of the book is a loving documentation of history. The author takes it back to the very dawn of Spacewar, the game written by MIT man Steve Russell in 1961, when plumped in front of Digital's new model computer, the PDP-1, a monstrous thing the size of three refrigerators but the first to use a screen and a keyboard instead of stacks of punch cards.
With a handful of equations, and some reality-building from his colleagues, Russell put together a two-player game of duelling spaceships firing photon torpedoes against a field of electronic stars. Russell was generous with the source code, and by the mid-1960s, there was a copy on every research computer in the US.
It's astonishing to think people actually got amusement from some of the other early games, played as text readouts, such as Lunar Lander, arguably the first recreational aircraft simulator; or Hammurabi, an early form of SimCity written in 50 lines of BASIC, which crudely simulated a feudal domain.
But something in the human animal ensured these things caught on, eventually hypnotising billions in bars and dingy arcades, before flooding on to the new PCs which had arrived in the US by the end of 1978. The giant games-manufacturers of the 1970s - Atari, Magnavox, Coleco - saw profits balloon until the market crashed in 1977, due to junk hardware clones flooding on to the market. The market more than recovered, but remained violently volatile. The second major crash in the 1980s in the US saw the market shrink from $36 billion in 1982 - bigger than all of Hollywood - to $100 million in 1985: Atari alone, by then bought out by Warner, lost $539 million, and buried millions of gamecartidges in a landfill in New Mexico. With the titanic battles of Sega and Nintendo today, the scale of the industry now is difficult to quantify.
The book also sketches a history of arcades, from the dawning of coin-operated mutoscopes, zoetropes and phonographs in the 1890s, through the teen meritocracy of the post-pinball low-lit video arcades of the 1970s and early 1980s, to the current wave of lurid family amusement centres and Exhilaramas, symbiotically attached to the gut of the shopping centre.
It's largely an American phenomenon and while, say, Dr Quirky's Emporium of Fun in O'Connell Street attempts to cater for all the family, it's really still all about its spinning R-360 and the abattoir din of its car-race games and headkicking Street Fighter 2s.
Some of the book's anecdotes are hilarious: tales of the test lab infiltrated by hardcore game players, resulting in an impossibly difficult game which set thousands of tots wailing over their vicious Christmas toy; of the Boeing engineer who retired to make a living from playing Defender tournaments (only in America); or great early sound wizards, pioneers of the new genre of assembly language music, such as Rob Hubbard, who re-rendered Pet Sounds on a FM synthesiser chip.
You can't help but get nostalgic at the sheer mention of all the classics: Tetris, Dig Dug, Centipede, Pole Position, SimCity, or god games such as Civilisation. I was weaned myself on Asteroids (now I'm really showing my age), and regularly managed to get my initials into the top-score lists of Space Invaders - all the old games which Microsoft is now filming and re-rendering in gamecode . . . but they're just not the same.
Retromania is now fuelling a thriving market for antique rarities, such as the ancient vector graphic promo, Coke Wins, which allows you to blow the floating letters of Pepsi to pixellated pulp; or Custer's Revenge from Multiple Industries in 1983 (a full decade before Mortal Kombat caused so much fuss in the US Congress) - in which you are expected to navigate a naked Custer with a six-pixel erection through arrows and prickly cacti to "score" with an Indian maiden tied to a pole.
I was a fair bit into Joystick Nation before I noticed the author was a young woman, born the year of the first arcade hit (Pong, 1972). She takes up the gender issue in a brief chapter about the industry's attempt to insinuate in less homicidal games such as Frogger, Tetris, Ms Pac-Man (sheesh) - or I suppose more recently, Lemmings. These are "games about coping, about imposing order," Herz claims. "Retreating for a woman is like breathing. We're used to the idea that you can win by giving ground."
It's interesting to note that this is an industry where "Females and Adults" is a categorical descriptor, rather like "women and children" when you talk about a sinking ship. The teenage boy is king, and it's not difficult to spot the target client for the harpies that crop up in Mortal Kombat 3, Street Fighter 2, Sega's Fighting Vipers or the female Terminator in Meat Puppets - with their lethal thunder-thighs and triple-D breast cones.
There's no mention anywhere in the book of the horrific gambling bug associated with poker slot-machines, but then it's not a terribly serious volume, just a breathless stab at circuit-laying an alternative cultural history.. Writing in molten techie language, Herz luxuriates in videogames as cultural artefacts, and manages to answer a lot of questions you've always been too busy punching your console to ask. Take a flip (it's got an index) next time you're in the game store - that's if the sale copies aren't all vacuum-wrapped in cellophane.
Joystick Nation, written by J.C. Herz, is published by Abacus. Price £9.99 in UK.