The Mega Drive and the Joys of Being Offline
I just eBayed my Mega Drive. The era is over.
Well, to be quite honest the era ended long ago – that time where I would spend several hours at a stretch perfecting Ken’s Dragon Punch combo, or racing myself in Sonic 2, or trying to find the key to get through the dungeon to get another key to find the sword to get back out again and carry on for an interminable amount of time talking to fairies and elves and whatnot so I could find treasure or something…Yes, that time has long passed. I haven’t played on any console really since I was about 16, after realising that I had no real memory of my fifteenth year.
I played the Mega Drive for one last time the other day before bundling it off to its new home. I hadn’t touched it for years, but thought I should give it a send off. The games were crap of course, but a certain serenity descended as I bored my way through Earthworm Jim. I was Offline, Private; I was playing a game and I was invisible to the world.
A peculiarity of gaming now, as with everything, seems to be this endless drive to talk to strangers while you’re doing it, an encouragement to compare your scores and stats endlessly with a seriously damaged minority who are clearly in need of gaming rehab. Either that or you’re playing Angry Birds on the tube and some bored commuter is watching over your shoulder as you try to get three bloody stars.
After all we’re always online (and no, the irony of this post hasn’t escaped me). The internet and its concomitant connectivity has us all tied together by an endless and often fruitless stream of shared information. Must we share everything?
The value of private time, offline time, is something I’m trying to recall for myself now. My new house has a mezzanine area above Finn’s room – I intend to turn it into an Offline Den, where reading, drawing, sitting and talking can happen. The feeling of not being watched, of being alone, is something that is becoming a rarity in my life, and as a phenomenon its importance is in danger of being ignored in wider society. Only when alone can we organise our thoughts, decompress and organise our outlook, and come to personal conclusions about the world, free from opinion or hearsay.
Now I have no consoles, the Mega Drive is gone. There were some happy times – the genuine excitement of our Streetfighter 2 tournaments. Obviously I kicked everyone’s ass, because I was a sad sack, but there was actual cheering, wooping even, as the battles took place. The drugs may have contributed, but who cares! We shared the moment in real space.
