I have never been much of a video gamer. I remember playing Pong on a 1976 Coleco Telstar console at a friend’s home in junior high and rapidly losing interest. I played a few games on a friend’s early 1980s Atari 2600 console, most memorably Pitfall. While many boys my age loved to play video games at arcades, I didn’t like spending money on them since my plays never lasted for long.

I did play a few imitations of arcade games on my 8-bit TRS-80 Color Computer at home in the early 1980s, such as Joust/Lancer, Zaxxon, and Pooyan. If I were mentally ill, I could play some of them again in a web browser. I would have enjoyed them more if they had offered more plays before resetting.

The only real arcade video game I played more than a few times was Ms. Pac-Man, but I don’t think I ever cleared more than a couple of screens in the game.

The clearest memory I have of an arcade game was when my late friend Jeff and I went to Turner Falls in our teens. When it was too rainy to hike or swim, we would take refuge in a room there with a Wizard of Wor game.

That game had a speech synthesizer, allowing the Wizard to taunt the players throughout the game. His taunts didn’t apply to me for long, as I would quickly lose all of my plays, but he would often remark, “Another worrier for my babies to devour” in response to Jeff earning a bonus player. I doubt he ever said that to me!

I lived in the Walker Tower dormitory during my freshman year at the University of Oklahoma, and on the ground floor they had a couple of video games in a side room. One was Spy Hunter, and I remember how every time I was in the foyer I would hear its low-quality take on the Peter Gunn theme.

I remember thinking, “I wonder how many of the guys playing that game have even heard of Peter Gunn or Henry Mancini?”

When I was young, there were no video games yet, but there were pinball machines on the porch of the old CCC lodge at Roaring River State Park in southwestern Missouri. I would beg a quarter off my parents when they were shopping in the park store that was in the lodge at the time. They would fund the distraction to get me out of the way in the crowded store.

In junior high and high school, while my friends would be playing Defender, Space Invaders, Asteroids, or Pac-Man at the local bowling alley, I would venture over to the back by the restroom to play a neglected pinball machine. Its gameplay was far less frustrating for me, and I liked its clunky electromechanical mechanisms. I was one of the first Patreon supporters of the YouTube channel Technology Connections, and I loved seeing Alec Watson analyze the old Aztec machine from 1976. That is the type of game I remember.

I played three-draw Microsoft Solitaire on Windows computers from time to time, but almost 30 years ago, I was delighted when I found 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet in the Microsoft Plus! 95 add-on. I played it on occasion in Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP. Dave Plummer tells about how he programmed the game port for XP and he got the straight scoop from Raymond Chen about why it disappeared from later versions of Windows.

Happily, awhile back I found a port for the iPad. I don’t play it often, but I’m glad to have it. Once I switched to a Mac mini for my home desktop computer, I tried that port out on macOS despite it not being tested for that environment. On my Mac mini M1, the game looked grainy and shifted to a weird position on the screen, but I figured out how to launch the ball, operate the flippers, and tilt the table, so it did work…but it looked pretty rough. I’ll stick with the iOS version.

I do have a subscription to Apple Arcade through the Apple One Premier account, so I downloaded a couple of pinball games from it for my Mac mini M4. One app was crummy, but Zen Pinball Party had decent reviews, and I’ve enjoyed playing Peanuts’ Snoopy Pinball on it, although I was better at playing the Williams Bally Attack from Mars machine.

Another YouTube channel I have long supported is TechMoan, and I was fascinated to see the AtGames Pinball Micro that Mat reviewed a year ago. It was eerie how realistic it looked on screen.

It’s the losing that turns me off on most video games. It always feels to me more like a disappointing defeat than a satisfying end. I found I liked the action games more if there was an infinite lives mode. I relate to the melancholic tone of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games:

I found some interest in the 1986 computer video game Starflight, which was more open-ended.

That led me to seek out other open-ended games. Decades ago I played Railroad Tycoon, SimCity and SimCity 2000, along with Myst. I later played the Myst sequels Riven, Exile, and Revelation, although I had to rely on the internet for clues to complete any of the Myst games, and I lost interest before Myst V: End of Ages was released.

I remember playing Riven in late 1997, and how it came on five compact discs. My 1993 Gateway 2000 486 had been upgraded with an 83 MHz Pentium Overdrive processor and 40 MB RAM, but it struggled to handle that game. I made it to the final sequence, and was frustrated that my computer would hang at that point.

To finish the game, I took it to school, of all places. I had written an Advanced Placement grant for a Gateway 2000 Destination system that had a huge CRT monitor hanging from a high corner of the classroom. I used it to run Interactive Physics simulations, show videos, and train students on doing graphical analysis and using probeware.

I stayed after school one day and loaded the game on the computer and played it in the classroom to the end. It felt very strange to be playing the game at work!

While I once enjoyed getting immersed into a Myst game, I found that hiking on a new trail in real life was far better for me, both mentally and physically. There are a multitude of activities I prefer over video games: watching a YouTube video, reading a book, taking a walk on the Pathfinder Parkway while listening to an audiobook, and…writing a blog post.