Deborah Hill Cone: Late adopter, but now I'm game

Opinion

Whatever is the opposite of early adopter, that's me. Late developer? I got an iPod the other day. But I am not a slow-arse adopter just out of slothfulness. Sometimes, when you have missed the boat and are so behind everyone else, it seems perverse to bother to catch up. If I can't be first, what's the point? I haven't watched The Wire but even when I have watched it, there is going to be little water-cooler leverage in telling anyone about it. Whereas I jumped on the Mad Men train early. There are lots of other trends I have skipped altogether: backyard chickens, tattoos, Coldplay, book clubs, Bikram yoga.

Then again, there are some social trends where the sheer weight of the zeitgeist crushes you and demands participation, no matter how late you are and how little premium there is in signing up. I suspect Facebook is like that. I am now friends with the owner of my dog's kennel, my nephew, my hairdresser, a gratifying array of ex-boyfriends and internet superstar Bryan Spondre - so it is not really a "trend" anymore. It just is.

So when I tell you I have got into something, you can rest assured it is now really, really mainstream and inescapable. And if you are not on to it yet, you soon will be. So take note: I am now a bona fide computer game addict. This is saying something. I used to have a snobby disdain for computer games in the manner of home-schooling parents who want their children to read Dickens of an afternoon. Computer games to me were simply "spacies" - Space Invader and Pacman - the kind of thing played by delinquent children who were allowed to hang at the dairy and chew gum while I was resentfully slouching off to ballet practice. What a little prig I was. But I now realise that computer games of 2009 are quite a different cut of meat and not just about going "beep beep" and killing aliens.

It started with Facebook friends who were into Mafia Wars and that stupid farming one. One of my friends spent real money - greenbacks on her credit card - to buy a virtual dog online to stop another friend from nicking her virtual crops. Then my 4-year-old daughter got into Club Penguin. And so did I. Club Penguin is known as a MMOG, or massively multiplayer online game, where players have a penguin avatar, or online character, in a virtual world with a variety of games and activities. You can earn coins from playing games and then buy virtual items to decorate your igloo and adopt pets, called Puffles. After being a member for a while you can become a secret agent penguin and get "missions" - which are quite complex problem-solving games - in this case tracking down the terrorist polar bear Herbert and his naughty sidekick crab, Klutzy.

We spent hours solving all the missions - often getting stuck. One night I woke up fretting about how I was going to get the snow to harden to fix the Club Penguin clock. The day came when we had finished all our missions and Gussie was bereft. I wrote to the people at Club Penguin (it was independently set up, but now owned by Disney) who replied that I could buy a Nintendo game called Elite Penguin Force.

Not surprisingly, one of the criticisms of Club Penguin is that it encourages consumerism. I bought the game. So now I feel like a real gamer. So what? The games industry says fast-paced, action-packed games stimulate cognitive capacity while goal-orientated initiatives allow children to strive to "beat the game". But they would say that, wouldn't they, since gaming is forecast to be worth $57 billion this year.

"My ability to negotiate Civilization 2 may (or may not) have directly influenced my inquiring mind," said a young Facebook friend of mine. "Arguably if games produce their own narratives, which they do, even employing Hollywood writers, the novel may therefore be redundant ... the counter-argument of course being that 'the classics' imbue philosophy into the reader in the most pragmatic form ..." See, he isn't too thick. This week there is a Beatles computer game out. How does that work? "You are Mark David Chapman and your job is to knock the specs off John Lennon". Aaron Bhatnagar, an Auckland City Councillor, said playing computer games had been educational. "After I got bored blowing away Thargoid Aliens, I found out about the wonderful world of trading in commodities between planets, identifying opportunities based on demographics and specific planetary economies. In retrospect, it was quite educational." So computer games are not such a waste of time after all.

deborah@coneandco.com