‘Joystick’ Tells How Video Games Shaped A Generation
So here’s J.C. Herz hovering over an espresso at Cybersmith, Harvard Square’s semi-elite digital cafe. And while she’s trying to be, you know, polite - after all, she’s here to sign copies of her new book - she wants you to know that she’s really an 1980s video arcade kind of gal. Like: linoleum on the floor, sensory overload, skanky teenagers in Van Halen T-shirts.
“This is sort of the bourgeois flip side of the arcade experience,” she murmurs tactfully, eyeing the subdued room.
Herz (pronounced like the rental car company), 25, is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who indeed has written the book on video and computer games.
“Joystick Nation” is a sharp-eyed history and critique of a multibillion-dollar global phenomenon that’s roughly the same age she is. Currently living in Manhattan, Herz is part of a generation of white-knuckle vidkids who grew up on more than two decades of games stretching from Pong to Mortal Kombat.
Jockeying video games has been as much a part of their lives as watching TV was to their parents.
Of course, there’s a crucial difference.
“In general, video games introduced millions of people to the idea that they could affect what happens on the screen,” Herz is explaining as her espresso cools. “Which is really important when you consider that we’re now a nation of people who’d rather walk four blocks to an ATM than stand in line at a bank to interact with a teller. And part of the reason people in their teens, 20s and early 30s took to the Internet so fast was that video games had made them used to making things happen on the screen. This was not an alien idea.”
When J.C. Herz talks, you don’t. Like her prose - and her curly hair, which she describes as the color of bittersweet chocolate - her words come in carefully arranged waterfalls that wash over anything in their way. Even without the espresso, she’s pumped.
“I can’t seem to sit still,” says the 5-foot-5-inch writer. “People say, ‘Oh, you should take a vacation, just chill out.’ But I can’t seem to do that.
“There are always more things to do and never enough time. I mean, I seriously hope cloning goes forward. All the work I could do if there were three of me!”
(Actually, there are at least four. While Herz won’t say what J.C. stands for - “I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you” - she’s Michelle Herz on her driver’s license. In her 1993 Harvard yearbook, she’s both Michelle J.C. Herz and J.C. Herz. At the registrar’s office, she’s Michelle J. Herz.) Given that the video-game planet is populated almost exclusively by males, what’s Herz doing on it anyway? And why aren’t there more girls with joysticks locked in their sweaty grips?
Second question first:
It’s the content, dummy. Most video games - with exceptions such as Tetris and Myst, which are popular among females - are explosions and fights strung out, as Herz puts it, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July.
“Realistically, touching a ‘fire’ button 380 times a minute is not a girl’s idea of fun,” she says. “Video games are designed by guys who grew up playing video games.
“Think about it: If you were a guy who spent your life playing video games, how much would you know about the female psyche? You wouldn’t have a clue what a 12-yearold girl might want to do with a computer. When we get more female designers, that may change.
“I have a feeling that a product that would really work for girls would be more an environment than a game. It would have a lot to do with social space and less to do with spatial perception. I mean, look at what girls do when they play with Barbie, for instance.
“It’s not Barbies attacking each other, like boys do with G.I. Joe. It’s more the character, the story, the situation. It’s role-playing.”
Herz herself took up video gaming because it was something to do with her brother, with whom she had little in common.
Born in South Africa, raised in a leafy suburb of Houston, she cranked up cartridges at home on the seminal Atari 2600 system while making forays to the nearby Memorial City Mall for an occasional arcade fix. Her parents, meanwhile, tried to get her to read the right books and frequent the right museums, and their plan worked.
At age 17 she went off to Harvard, where she majored in biology and environmental studies, lived in Kirkland House, hung out at the Lansdowne Street music clubs in Boston, and interned at the Boston Phoenix. If she left her video games at home “with my childish ways” and found the ‘Net - her wellreceived first book, “Surfing on the Internet,” was published in 1994 - she also noticed something at Harvard.
“While I was discovering the ‘Net, the hard-core computer dudes were in the Science Center playing Doom at all hours of the night,” she says, referring to the early 1990s video-game hit.
Despite her fondness for arcade grunge, Herz clearly maintains a clinician’s distance from her subject. OK, so she waxes enthusiastic about Gunblade, a new arcade game from Sega in which the player uses an attack helicopter to hunt and destroy terrorists in New York. On the other hand, here at Cybersmith she turns down an invitation to strut her stuff on Virtua Fighter, Nintendo’s classic 3-D warrior game.
“When I go to arcades, I watch the people,” she confesses. “I’m interested in the anthropology.
“Besides, only 40 percent of the people in an arcade are actually playing the games at any one time. The others are watching or talking to each other.”