Chasing Ghosts

    Imagine that you’re in the back of a dimly lit bar in rural North Carolina.  You’re talking to a bespectacled, heavy-set gentleman, slow of eye and soft of speech, who’s pouring out his life’s woes to you between slurps of amber draft.  He tells you that he has no job, that he lives alone, and that he is not on speaking terms with his best friend, not since the two had a blistering fight over twenty years ago.  “What did you two fight about?” you ask.  And the man says that the friend beat his high score in Berserk.

    Do you laugh at this man?  He did, after all, just say something ridiculous.  Or do you sympathize with him, unable to mock a guy for whom this is clearly a very, very serious business?  If you ever happen to catch a 2007 documentary called Chasing Ghosts, and I think anyone with a subscription to Netflix and even a passing interest in video games should, you’ll get to make your own decision.  The man’s name is Joel West, and he’s one of a group of guys who back in the grand old 80s considered themselves to be the greatest video game players in the world.

    Of course, this was in the days when video games were confined mainly to arcade machines like Pac Man and Asteroids.  The title of Greatest Video Game Player in the World means something very different today, but just try telling these guys that.  Watching this movie, I caught myself absentmindedly gaping more than a few times after one of the now middle-aged arcade heroes reflected on their gaming pasts.  Consider our Berserk player from above, who at one point looks into the camera and says without a trace of irony that “there are days when you and the game become one.”  Or take Roy Scildt, a Missile Command prodigy, who talks down to his colleagues for playing “pansy-ass” games like Pac Man rather than “macho” ones like Missile Command.  The movie’s best running joke, or maybe it isn’t a joke, is that these guys take what looks from a distance to be a trifling hobby deadly seriously.  They talk about their high scores in Donkey Kong as though they’re Olympic gold medals.  Half the time I wasn’t sure whether to double over laughing or burst into tears.

    And yet, there are times when the movie inspires genuine wistfulness.  Director Lincoln Ruchti structures his documentary around a 1982 gathering of these gamers in Ottumwa, Iowa, the self-proclaimed video game capitol of world.  They were meeting to compete against each other in the pursuit of all-time high scores at the Twin Galaxies Arcade, and the strange thing is that some people actually took notice.  Life Magazine profiled the event as representative of the age, local cheerleaders became gaming “groupies,” and a few of the best players got the chance to compete against each other on national television.

    But of course it couldn’t last.  Arcades started to empty as home consoles came to the fore, and most of these kids seemed unwilling to make the switch.  In another of those tragi-comic moments, one gamer criticizes Street Fighter 2 for being too ostentatious and lacking the character of simpler games like Millipede.  Some of the guys grew up to be the kind of navel-gazing, basement-dwelling stereotypes modern gamers have been trying to escape for decades, but most of them moved on, got jobs, and started families.  What they have mostly in common is that they all look back on their days as gaming superstars as some of the happiest of their lives, and after a while I admit their nostalgia proved catching.

    So how are we supposed to react to these guys?  Laugh or cry?  Viewers could be forgiven for doing the former.  We’re talking about men who freely admit to playing Galaga for 48 hours straight and then smiling smugly as if they’d just won a Nobel Prize.  But there are too many moments of real vulnerability to take the entire thing as a joke.  Battlezone specialist Sam Blackburn has a particularly open moment, admitting that he took to video games after braking up with his girlfriend, killing time by moving flashing dots across an arcade screen when he wanted to be spending it with someone special.  The role of video games in society has evolved so much over the past thirty years.  They’re in our homes, they’re shared with our family and friends, and to play them, even to play them a lot, is considered an ordinary hobby rather than a strange handicap.  But I wonder if there aren’t some gamers who still feel a bit of a sting when they tell someone they love video games and get a flustered look in return.  Maybe the guys profiled in Chasing Ghosts are pioneers, digital frontiersmen who legitimized gaming for future generations.

    Or maybe they’re hopeless nerds.  Watch the movie and decide for yourself.