The reason we were in London was to see the Science Museum's Game On exhibition, an exhibition notable (or perhaps, sadly, no longer notable in the Science Museum) for its complete lack of science. It was Grate Fun, though, giving us a chance to play everything from Pong to PaRappa the Rapper. It was hard to see a linear narrative -- the exhibition didn't try very hard to enforce one, though frankly I was more interested in running from side to side going "Oooh! Shiny!" anyway -- but interesting to see such a variety of games in one place, to think about what makes a game fun, and to see just how bad (or, in some cases, how good) the graphics really were in the olden days. Or indeed lack of graphics: it was a shame that the only text adventure represented there was the notoriously impossible Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy adventure game (which I mention partly in order to plug the shiny new version with gorgeous graphics by
The commentary on the exhibition was minimal (and read as if it had been hastily cribbed from Wikipedia) but it still at one point managed to trigger my usual ten-second rant about the idea that the way to get women playing computer games is to make them more social, more emotional. For heaven's sake! If I want social and emotional stimuli, I'll talk to people (LiveJournal: it's like The Sims, with fewer pictures); from computer games, on the other hand, I want addictive gameplay, decent music, bright lights, and the ability to blast things into smithereens.
Another minor rant is that is far as I could see, no Apple ][, BBC or Mac games were represented, which I found quite astounding: it would have made sense if the remit had been solely video/console games, but there were a couple of PC games in there, most notably the beautiful freeware game Warning Forever (which I'd never seen before, but will be downloading to
Computer games were possibly not the obvious choice of entertainment for Valentine's Day, though thinking about it, being a bespectacled nerd has never done my romantic prospects any harm. When the cutest boy in the whole of my small primary school came round to MY HOUSE it was because we had a copy of Chuckie Egg (and in fact all we ever did was play computer games, but still, CUTE BOY, MY HOUSE, SO THERE); and virtually none of my serious relationships would have happened if I hadn't been able to speak Unix or use netnews and irc. (I suppose I met
All in all, a productive day's Bunking Off. And now it's nearly the weekend!