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Honestly, this is not an unreasonable take for 1982.
The most recent home console would've been the Colecovision and the most popular arcade game would've been Donkey Kong.
The NES was still 3 years away and she likely never heard of any of the more narrative PC games of the time like Adventure or Zork.
The only bad part of this take is the insinuation that the only things that last are educational
That was such a weird take from moms of the era. I remember hearing it all the time as a kid, and I thought it was absolutely stupid. Now that I'm all grown up, I still think it's absolutely stupid.
Sounds like you learnt something.
Are you saying you didn't spend hours with your slide rule as a kid?
Video games took over from pinball machines in arcades, which had been popular and making money for decades.
I am old enough to remember seeing the first space invaders machine arriving in a pinball parlour in 1979. It was a massive hit. By 1982, arcade video games were already making serious money.
Yeah, these days it's obvious that video games are the next logical step in media consumption. First we had audio. Then we had audio+video. Now we have audio+video+interaction. You can literally watch a movie inside of a video game, if you care to.
But back then, the audio and video qualities of games weren't yet terribly developed. You could still easily find board games, or heck, sports, that were more complex than Pac-Man and Space Invaders.
I can definitely see that one would think, it's a novelty and not be able to imagine how cineastic games would become, or that some even contain books worth of history lessons.
She was likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sharon saw the writing on the wall. The game industry flood the market with a lot of crap games and consoles in that time period, leaving to the infamous 1983 video game crash.
That crash was caused by arcades popping up everywhere. Laser titles like dragons lair and space ace were full on animated video while the 2600 had 20 yellow pixels for Indiana Jones. You had two button running on track and field, flight sticks on tron and zaxxon, sit down cabs with steering wheels or the yoke in the star wars cab competing with the iconic but boring 2600 stick.
Wasn't the market being flooded, it was nobody having any cash for a 2600 cartridge because we put it all in the arcade cabs ;)
Arcades rule and I'm so glad they're still a thing here in Korea.
If it's any consolation, I don't think there's a single significant thing in history that someone hasn't wrongly identified as a passing fad
"Only 140 characters? That's stupid. That will never go anywhere." - Me, circa 2006.
To be fair, Twitter agreed and upped the character count.
Pshh iPhone who would want that? My n95 has a flip out keyboard much better than some stupid touchscreen phone that doesn't even have a camera.
I see people now saying AI is a fad lol, people really do think they were born at the end of history.
The older parts of my town have metal rings set into the curbs for tying up horses, because they were sure those new-fangled cars were just a fad. (Mind you, most of these neighborhoods were being built around the time the Ford Motor Company started up.)
Written by someone with the job title of word processor, something that did not exist 10 years before this was written.
When I started working in 2011, we had a file share we published documents to called "word processing". It was called that because the one file share was the only remains of the previous word processing department, which was presumably staffed by word processors.
While videogames are still here, OCR technology has replaced a lot of human word processors.
As late night show hosts have learned for years, the average person's opinion is pretty fucking stupid a lot of the time.
(I'm sure I'm not an exception.)
She wasn't too far off. The whole industry crashed in North America the following year. iirc, basically anyone could make a 2600 game. So you got hot garbage like Custer's Revenge and ET. This opinion was published before the crash and before Nintendo entered North America and essentially saved the industry here by implementing quality standards.
It probably would have eventually picked back up, but not for several years.
Damn, I remember when Nintendo used to be cool.
I think the problem was a lack of foresight about the potential of the technology because of limited awareness of what was going on at the time. If you had looked over at games for computers that weren't affected in the crash like the Apple II, you'd see that they were gaining increasing complexity. But, of course, a lot more kids had, at the very least, a pong console in their home by 1982, so this person probably was only familiar with those cheap 2600 games.
Even an Atari 2600 was too expensive for the average family in 1982, about $1000 in today money. The 80s were not a great economy for most people, Reagan's fuckery and I believe really high interest rates thanks to 70s inflation meant that even the cheapest home console was wildly unreasonable. It was 1982. Colecovision was on shelves. Television was still a very pricey home luxury in 1982, not a universal yet, so never mind the game console. The VCR wasn't really a thing yet. People were still using radio a lot at home. You could afford radio.
Video games looked like they were always going to cost too much money to see really mainstream adoption. That thought isn't even wrong, people just try harder to find the $1000 for a new console now, because it offers more. Sharon thought video games looked like shit, and she was right, they did. They didn't look exciting, they just looked like a weird side technology.
For her, video games were a thing in a dark corner of the amusement park, they were literally Pong, and cost quarters to play, 80 cents today, for a five-minute experience or a lot less.
Pac-Man was the current gold standard of games in 82. Did kids like it? Sure. But remember Pogs? Fidget spinners? Those snap bands for your wrist? How many things have been wildly popular with children and then into the trash they go, forever? Did Pac-Man look like something that nobody would ever grow tired of, forever? Or did it look like an excuse to sell toys? Because it very much was, they sold a lot of Pac-Man toys and merch about it, just like the 80s cartoons that faded into obscurity once they were also done selling toys.
Sharon didn't have a lot of evidence before her that would show any other outcome. She couldn't see 2023 while staring down at the Pac-Man quarter muncher at the local pizza shop in 82. It's miserable, because a proper fad and the wave of the future both look the same in the present.
Sharon was a "word processor" in 82, she was well ahead of the curve, working with computers - or at least their precursors - when most people hadn't even seen one. Somebody shoves a mic in your face, asks for a quote, and you give them an opinion, which haunts your fuckin ghost decades later. Maybe five years later she thinks oh, I was wrong on that, but it's too late now.
This is why we don't try to predict the future any more than we have to. Today's information is never good enough.
The issue with ET, just like today, was circumstance. A bunch of suits came to a programmer with almost no time to develop the game and shoved it out the door. The reason it's cited as the industry killer is so many people bought that trash game they lost faith. There was so much shovelware back then.
Nintendo learned from that mistake, that's why they had their console on lock down. If you didn't have their blessing, you didn't make a game on their platform. There was a lot of lawsuits towards Nintendo because of that, but their intense scrutiny is why those games were generally quality and why they revived the home console industry.
Today we are back to where we were with the Atari, companies that don't have the skills to develop certain games are being asked to do it, often under extreme deadlines. Look at what happened with Gollum, basically a modern day equivalent to ET imo. The reason the industry almost died is because so many people got burnt by things like ET. You would think it's bound to happen again, and it might, but then again people still preorder stuff post disasters like no man's and cyberpunk.
There are a lot of mistakes that could be learned from in that era of gaming, but damn if we aren't hellbent on repeating it.
She's right, we did get bored of video games. Instead we just invented countless new genres, art mediums, technologies, and entire fields of research. As well as built massive, multi-billion dollar industries just to develop, market, and sell video games.
Yeah, if we were still playing Pong we could laugh at her but we’ve moved on as she predicted.
Sharon B Word-Processor comes from a long and distinguished line of Word-Processor's.
My dad said this exact same thing to me in the early 2000s with the dawn of the early web. He claimed it was only a fad that would soon die away.
Yup. Fad.
People are saying that about crypto and AI today.
I mean, crypto might actually be a fad, but AI is certainly going to be as impactful as the internet was. Yes there will be booms and crashes but overall it will transform society.
I would say crypto is more a failure than a fad. If it had been successful, people would have continued to use it.
That's the thing. Every big thing has been misidentified as a fad.
But also you don't hear about that other 10 000 things that were called a fad and ended up being a fad.
Crypto might very well be a fad. At least only because of public misuse as an unregulated gambling market. It had potential to be great, but in my opinion, the in-between time of being a scammer's paradise has killed it for the near future.
There is pretty much no way "AI" is a fad. It won't replace everything, but integrating it into CAD tools, writing tools, and multimedia tools is pretty much inevitable.
For sure. If you're reading this and haven't messed around with an llm like chatgpt yet, do yourself a favor and ask it some questions or to perform some simple tasks. Like a search engine, using it is a skill you'll need to develop, and like anything you read on the internet you need to use due diligence, because it can be wrong. But as long you are aware of its strengths and faults, imo it's the probably the best research tool since search engines. You're doing yourself a disservice ignoring it if you think it's a fad
Sharon seems fun
And schmaaart.
That aged worse than a carton of milk infected with fungus
I mean, the same thing is being said about the Metaverse today. I get the hate for the corporate dystopian ones, but it does not mean it will just fade away. The Metaverse, or really many of them as they are decentralized, are still being incubated, but they are coming and some are being very well received for those who seek them out.
Why are we calling it the metaverse when things like VR chat existed long before Meta came into the picture
VRChat is already a success, and it can be seen as an early iteration of a VR metaverse. It's just the beginning.
That was shortly before the 1983 crash goddammit!
Sharon B is dead.
Confidence is a bitch
I think the market shifted from being pretty mainstream and crashing to become marketed specifically to kids. That age group still lives on and continues to be the main demographic.
Update: Sharon has been to the Betty Ford Clinic 16 times since the late 80's for video game addiction.
How long should I keep waiting!?
I mean the industry did crash the next year...
