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.
She was likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.Except the greatest educational game of all time was already ten years old and dead from dysentery by the time she was speaking.
I think it’s more a case of her certainty coming from a lack of knowledge about the subject and the assumption that because she doesn’t know about it that it doesn’t exist.
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.
Seeing how common “threads” became on Twitter, it didn’t go anywhere indeed.
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.)
While videogames are still here, OCR technology has replaced a lot of human word processors.
Written by someone with the job title of word processor, something that did not exist 10 years before this was written.
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.
Breaking news: games to outlast the paper we printed this in.
Update: Sharon has been to the Betty Ford Clinic 16 times since the late 80’s for video game addiction.
