Silicon Insider: Video Gaming
July 15, 2004 -- It won't be long now — say 10 years — before the Gamers rule the Zeitgeist.
I remember, as a boy in Mountain View, then Sunnyvale, Calif., right smack in the middle of what would become Silicon Valley, having certain hobbies and favorites that bordered on fanaticism. For example, I read Mad magazine until I gravitated to National Lampoon. I knew the models, engine displacement and options of every Detroit muscle car (my favorite was the GTO) and eventually had a girlfriend who drove a '67 Firebird 400 convertible.
At different times in my childhood, I had pictures of Rat Fink, the Beach Boys and Jimi Hendrix on my school binder, and I knew the dirty lyrics to "Louie Louie." I variously wore surfer clothes, Beatle boots and paisley shirts with white collars. I saw Traffic at Winterland and Frank Zappa and the Mothers at some place I don't quite remember. I wandered around Haight-Ashbury, danced to the Doobies in a Santa Cruz Mountains biker bar, and I was supposed to go to Altamont, but bailed at the last moment when I heard about the traffic jam.
In other words, I'm just another dreary Baby Boomer, one born early enough to have been a proto-hippie, but late enough to have caught the beginning of Yuppiedom.
If you are younger than me (which the actuarial tables say you most likely are) you've have heard this Boomer crap until you are ready to puke … even as you go out and buy the latest Beatles collection. And I don't blame you.
Except for the music, I was never really that impressed by my generation, which largely managed to convert a historically unique advantage in prosperity, education and numbers into a narcissistic blight on American history. It will take 50 more years for America to get over the damage wrought by the Baby Boomers … and, hey, sorry.
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