Media

...Could a generation trained to fight the screen, to figure out ways of beating the game on the screen-could such a generation, one wonders, have been quite so complacent, for quite so long, about the nightly reports of our obscene game in Vietnam...

...Like a great number of Americans, I count among the members of my household an adolescent...

...And maybe I'll even join Eric at the set sometime and try to punch out Mike Tyson (now that we know it's possible...

...In Rifkin's book, for example-and he is quite convincing about this-the invention of the clock, or the much later invention of the secondhand, is as important a turning-point in human self-definition as the discovery of the laws of motion or of nuclear fission...

...The fact is that the computer game is potentially creative and liberating...

...No illusions here: the people at Nintendo, and the numerous companies fighting them over monopolization of the market, are obviously in the very singleminded business of making you buy your kids as many of their games as you can afford...

...Its point-garnished with an elegant salad-bar of recondite and fascinating detail-is that, from prehistory on, a very large part of the way we think about ourselves has to do with the way we measure time...

...At any rate, I have in my home a thing that allows my twelve-year-old to plug it in and play not on it but with it...

...and that means that, like a great number of Americans, I have a Nintendo set in my home...

...To the contrary...

...hookup...

...I do not believe that they are informed by a higher epistemological purpose...

...I take a more moderate view...

...These engagements range from fantasy games, complete with appropriate music and sound effects, to medieval quest-romances through contemporary films like Batman and Roger Rabbit to originals like "Play Action Football" and the cosmically popular "Super Mario Brothers"-whose scenario, come to think of it, is pretty much that of a medieval quest-romance...

...William Gibson, who may be the hottest young writer in science fiction, and the father of what is called "cyberpunk"-actually an overlay of conventional thriller plot on computer-technology-shows this effect as clearly as Rifkin analyzes it...

...Although I'm not sure, computer illiterate that I am, that "set" is the exact term: device...

...But then again, they don't have to be...

...Much as I admire both Rifkin and Gibson, I can't bring myself to believe that interfacing with the computer will finally either corrode our biological clocks or lead us to a perception of God...

...Even more interestingly, several drinks-and-dinner guests of my g-g-generation have disappeared into the room with Eric, emerging later with shamefaced grins and muttering things like, "Yeah, that's a really hard game to stop-hey, sorry, have I held things up...

...And one of Rifkin's main assertions in Time Wars is that, in our increasingly accurate measurement of time, we have in fact broken through to a new "kind" of time-computer time-which, subdivided by the speed of light itself, surpasses all our attempts to "measure" it and thence becomes a kind of nonhuman time that measures us...

...It is of course addictive...

...FRANK McCONNELL Frank McConnell is a member of the English Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara.a at Santa Barbara...

...Eric, our own Nintendo commando, has been known to disappear into his room for hours of rapt communion with the set, exclaiming his triumph over various obstacles in the game to the accompaniment of assorted computer beeps and burbles-almost as if he were on a date with R2D2...

...My generation, which grew up with "Captain Video" and "Howdy Doody" and later graduated to "Star Trek" and "Magnum P.I.," is also the generation that gave rise to the concept of the couch potato, and which-this is not irrelevant- elected Nixon twice and then Reagan twice...

...And it is this...

...And now comes a technology that allows our kids to talk back to the omnipotent box, to use the box in an exercise of skill, dexterity, and-something we would never have thought of in relation to the TV-altering the events on the screen...

...you don't get hungry or thirsty as fast as you would, say, reading a book, just because, for the "time" you're playing "Super Mario," you are in a kind of sempiternity...

...In his wonderful novel, Neuromancer, Gibson gives us the adventures of a futuristic computer cowboy in "cyberspace," which is transparently modeled on the experience of playing computer games, and whose plot-no one else, I think, has noticed this-is basically a discovery of the transcendently wise Artificial Intelligence based quite strictly on the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy...

...Maybe because I am an outsider, a nonplayer of the games, I can notice something not immediately apparent to those within the net...

...It sounds like classic science fiction-the machine coming to dominate its creator-until you think about Nintendo...

...The one experience, probably, which every American family has in common is checking the listings for the night "to see what's on": not really to choose, that is, but to see the limited options available...

...This is exactly Rifkin's point: that when you interface with the computer, you interface with truly instantaneous time-or as nearly instantaneous as lightspeed can be-and regular time is thereby suspended...

...So Rifkin may have been too pessimistic...

...We have come quite a way from "Pong," the only computer game at which I was ever very good...

...matrix...

...We did not need to be bullied into behaving like cattle, we did it to ourselves, every night at five or six o'clock, depending on your time zone...

...TV, as a crucial but almost always unacknowledged fact of our lives, conditioned us to be receptors...

...You blink less...

...At least, it may represent a moment at which technology, moving as always at its own pace and according to its own potencies, actually reinforces a sense of individual choice which had previously all but atrophied...

...But don't worry: this is not going to be one of those essays where an older-generation grump discovers that a new technology is rotting the cognitive faculties of the young and producing a future race of ethical mutants...

...And that experience-the experience of being a kind of hostage audience to a national ritual of entertainment and information-may have more to do with our public failure of nerve over the last three decades than any other single fact...

...The TV went one way-toward us-and over what it had to tell us, we had precious little control...