Finding the joy in enforced delay
In my less successful moments as a parent, I’m prone to stumbling into the it-wasn’t-like-this-when-I-was-your-age trap.
I say trap, because as a strategy it feels deeply flawed: the expectation that my children will suddenly fully absorb, relate to, and ask excitable questions about items or events they’ve never encountered is a ridiculous notion when you step back from it.
“There were really only four television channels? Please, tell me more”. “I like the sound of this modem thing, and how interesting you used to plug a cable into the wall to access the Internet”. “You used to have to turn a big circular dial to make phone calls – and no texting either?”.
Reader, they could not give less of a shit about such matters.
I guess the worry I’m trying to get my head around is that so much of life is now available on demand or at the flick of a switch, the seemingly inevitable result is that somewhere down the line there will be negative consequences.
These could include:
Lack of appreciation of skills/craft/effort required to produce things;
Inability to get lost in a moment, or take time out to think;
Undertake even the briefest of brain pauses before moving on to next activity;
Only form of communication limited to vague grunts of recognition.
Much of this parental concern undoubtedly stems from my own anxieties about spending too much time staring expectantly at my phone, endless doomscrolling habits, and the irresistible urge to react to notifications as they pop in. But while I absolutely fess up to this panic-by-proxy, I’m also pretty convinced that my own sensibilities were shaped by certain types of delayed gratification.
And one specific example of having to dramatically slow the pace down is the process I had to go through to play video games when I was the same age as my kids are now.
In the 1980s, when the first wave of home computing really took off, I – like many others – became the proud owner of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Although this was technically a joint Christmas present to me and my younger sister, I largely commandeered the rubber-keyed black box when it burst into our lives.
Manufactured in Dundee, the Spectrum was roughly the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Our unit sat in our living room on top of an unattractive lacquered table, right in front of the family TV. Alongside it was a cassette player, an essential peripheral if you wanted to play games or load other types of software.
Later we added a joystick to get a proper arcade vibe, however games could still be played using the distinct rubber keys, most memorably/alarmingly when hammering left and right to build up strength or speed in games like the iconic Daley Thompson’s Decathlon. The joystick itself had to be attached to the back of the computer via another piece of kit, called simply ‘interface’. You could buy these or, for the obsessively keen, build your own.
Already that’s a fairly hefty hardware set up, complete with numerous interconnecting wires and power cables, which required a decent understanding of how the ecosystem slotted together. And we haven’t even got to the games bit yet.
At that time, all Spectrum games needed to be loaded onto the computer from cassette tapes. Later models integrated a disc drive, but in the early eighties all of the popular home computers used tapes.
For a game to successfully load, the volume had to be set at a certain level – if it was too quiet, or too loud, the audio signal could be affected and cause an error. After much experimentation we found the best loading volume was around 7.5 (on a scale of zero to ten). Our cassette recorder lacked any visible volume settings, so my mum had to pimp ours with Tippex to highlight the optimum level.
To get things kicked off, you popped your tape into the cassette recorder, typed LOAD "" followed by ENTER on the Spectrum’s homescreen, pressed ‘Play’, and then hoped for the best.
And this is the point, this time hole that opened up while the software loaded, where I remember a beautiful period of waiting and wondering.
The whole process could take between five and twenty minutes, and this gifted me and my friends a period where we could chew the fat, make jokes, flick through the latest edition of Crash, admire the grainy loading screen works of art that appeared as a teaser of what was to come, and generally bond over stuff that interested us.
Sometimes an error would occur partway through loading. This could be down to the volume settings or, if the software was a pirated copy, the degradation from tape-to-tape recording would sometimes impact the audio. Whatever the case, it required the procedure to start over: rewind tape, tweak volume, retype instructions, press play again, repeat as necessary. Undeniably this caused some annoyance and impatience, but also made the anticipation build all the more.
Sure, I’m * clearly * over romanticising here: gaming wasn’t always an activity with friends, and banter wasn’t always that friendly; sometimes you just wanted to get on and play, and all the hanging around was v boring; sometimes the end result really wasn’t worth the wait. But overall there was something that felt valuable and informative in those moments, learning to focus on the journey as well as the destination.
When I watch my kids playing Minecraft or Roblox or Fortnite, I recognise some of the same joy in gaming, in participating, in chatting and laughing with peers that I felt when I was their age. But with the instantaneous hit afforded by finely-tuned hardware, slick apps, and solid broadband, I do wonder if they’re missing out on the experiences gained when things take just a little longer to come to fruition.
And as I struggle with my own attention deficits and self-inflicted pressure pressure pressure to READ, CLICK, CONSUME more more more, I try to draw breath and transplant myself back to a time when delay wasn’t just the norm, it was an integral part of the whole experience.
Epilogue
When I downloaded the Spectaculator app to my iPad I was excited to find it not only lets you play many Spectrum games in their full 8-colour glory, but also – should you choose to – sit through the entire loading sequence for each title.
“Amazing!” I thought, and to much fanfare gave my offspring the opportunity to both play the games that occupied their dad’s youth as well as live through the full rigmarole of how they loaded.
And did they rise to the challenge, intrigued and exhilarated to follow in my footsteps and discover the making of a man?
I’ll let you guess.
🎧 How do I use the Internet now?
Search Engine and The Ezra Klein Show are two of my weekly must-listen podcasts, and this episode brings them together in perfect harmony.
PJ Vogt talks to Ezra Klein to explore “a question that's increasingly confounded us: is there a sane way use the internet, now?… How do I get information about the things I care about without getting sucked into a vortex of opinion, unearned certainty, and yelling?”
It’s a brilliant hour of audio: funny, insightful, relatable and timely. It covers delayed gratification, the fight for attention, and “performing for an audience that doesn’t exist”. And there’s a surprise Glaswegian bonus if you make it to the closing credits.
👋 Bye for now
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