The
Real Definition of "Old School"

By Shayalyn

Yesterday I was talking to
my kids and, as difficult as it is for me to wrap my mind around, I actually
began a statement with the following:

"You know, when I was
your age, we didn't have…."

It's
official--I've become my mom, or even my grandmother. Oh, the horror!
Next thing I know I'll be doing what Bill Cosby once accused his father
of doing--telling my children that I had to walk ten miles to school in
six feet of snow carrying 50 pounds of textbooks. Uphill. Both ways. And
that I was grateful for it.

I suppose it's natural for
parents to remind their children how good they've got it. Hell, my kids
live in the lap of luxury compared to what I had when I was a child. They've
each got their own color TV. We own a PS2, an Xbox, and there's a Gamecube
a couple miles down the road at Grandma's house. Both kids have a computer.
The older of the two (he's 11) is wired into our cable Internet. And I
believe my eight-year-old daughter inadvertently sparked my when-I-was-your-age
lecture by complaining that our lack of a wireless router was putting
a crimp in her ability to access Barbie.com on a 24/7 basis.

Nope, we had none of those
things when I was a kid. Technology was limited. We had one color TV in
the living room, and my mother had a 12" black-and-white set in the
kitchen. My gaming experience began one Thanksgiving when my cousin Susie
(the rich one, with not one but two color TVs in her home) took my brothers
and me down to her family's rec room and introduced us to Pong. We were
occupied for hours, volleying a white dot back and forth across the TV
screen via two radio-dial controllers. And the Internet--we'd never heard
of it. In fact, never mind the Internet; to our minds computers existed
only as enormous whirling gizmos with spinning tape reels and flashing
lights that occupied entire rooms in government buildings, not a square
foot or two on a desktop.

I
was born in 1966; the tail end of the Baby Boomer era and the beginning
(depending on which source you believe) of Gen X. I was a teenager throughout
most of the '80s, and yes, I actually owned a pair of leg warmers, some
rainbow-colored suspenders (inspired by Robin Williams on Mork and Mindy),
and Calvin Klein jeans I had to zip by lying flat on my back and yanking
the zipper pull up with the hook of a wire coat hanger. (To my credit,
I was too classy to sport either a mullet or a tail.) When it came to
gaming, I was completely blissed out playing Space Invaders, Asteroids
and Pitfall on the Atari. And as for computers, my first "computer"
was a little keyboard that hooked up to the TV (not a Commodore 64; I
wasn't lucky enough to have one of those) that I learned to program in
Basic, creating trivia quizzes I would then make my family play.

And now I'm a gamer-a mature
one, but a gamer nonetheless. And I am, of course, an avid fan of Vanguard:
Saga of Heroes. So are a lot of other Gen Xers, according to this
thread
on the Official Vanguard Forums. We may have grown up in the
Atari generation, but now we're taking the MMO world by storm.

And
a lot of us "old folks" are women. It's more likely that a mature
gamer will be female, according to Nick
Yee's Daedalus Project
, which encompasses several years of extensive
research on MMOs and their demographics. In fact, the highest percentage
of female gamers fall between the ages of 23 and 40, while male players
tend to be between 12 and 28. (To my mind, this explains a lot about some
of my gaming experiences, but I digress.) There are some things these
statistics don't take into consideration, such as the disproportionate
balance of male gamers to female, but they're still interesting.

So, this mature female MMO-player
is definitely having fun experiencing games far more compelling than Pacman
or Donkey Kong ever were. Cousin Susie may have had a good thing goin'
with Pong back in the day, but now I'm able fire up the PC (which is,
of course, connected to the Internet) and venture into magical lands along
with a few thousand other gamers. And, some time in 2006, this Gen X girl
will meet the next generation of online gaming with Vanguard. I can hardly
wait.

I
figure someday my grandchildren will be jacked into their virtual reality
games, running around some futuristic world experiencing not just sights
and sounds, but scents and tactile sensations as well. They won't just
chat with their fellow gamers, they'll be able to walk up and shake hands
with a new guild-mate and experience whether his handshake is firm or
wimpy; his hands cold and clammy, or hot and dry.

Someday I'll be telling my
grandkids about my adventures in Telon, and how we thought it was the
greatest, most impressive thing since Nintendo. I imagine the conversation
I'll have will start something like this:

"Kiddo, when I was your
age, all we had were pixels on a screen. We had to type on a keyboard
or speak into a microphone to communicate with one another. We thought
staring into a 17" monitor for hours on end was the shiz. And you
know what? We were grateful for it!"


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Karen is H.D.i.C. (Head Druid in Charge) at EQHammer. She likes chocolate chip pancakes, warm hugs, gaming so late that it's early, and rooting things and covering them with bees. Don't read her Ten Ton Hammer column every Tuesday. Or the EQHammer one every Thursday, either.

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