Culture Shock 04.23.15: Documentary digs up Atari's past

Before Xbox, PlayStation and Wii, there was Atari, once America's dominant video game maker.

Today, Atari is a logo on retro-styled T-shirts but little else, and Atari's rise and fall are the subjects of Zak Penn's documentary "Atari: Game Over," now streaming on Netflix.

Full disclosure: The only home video game console I've ever owned is the Atari 2600, released in 1977. My time as a gamer ended around 1983. But for a while, I was obsessed: playing video games, reading magazines about video games, calling telephone hot lines to get the latest news and release dates for video games — you name it.

Two of my favorite Atari 2600 games, "Yar's Revenge" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," were designed by the same programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw. When I finally beat "Raiders," I chalked it up as a significant accomplishment. Warshaw's games were tough but fair. Little did I — or anyone else  — suspect that Warshaw and his next game were destined to become scapegoats for the collapse of not only Atari but the entire first wave of home video gaming.

Warshaw's next game was "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," based on the movie, obviously. Rushed into stores for Christmas 1982, "E.T." sold roughly 1.5 million units, but it failed to meet Atari's stratospheric expectations. Millions more cartridges remained unsold.

In 1983, the home video game market crashed, doing in Atari and most of its rivals. "E.T.," which would go on to earn an unfair reputation as the "worst video game ever," took a lot of the blame. And from that, an urban legend arose: that Atari, in the dead of night, buried its millions of unsold "E.T." cartridges in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The landfill legend is the hook for Penn's documentary. Penn introduces us to Joe Lewandowski, waste disposal expert and amateur archaeologist. Lewandowski believes the legend is true, and he has a good idea where in the landfill the lost "E.T." games are buried.

So the question is, is this "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with a prize waiting at the end, or is this Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's "vault" and finding only a couple of broken bottles?

While large earth movers excavate a trash heap in search of Atari's shame, Penn takes us back to the glory days of Atari, interviewing Warshaw and company executives. On the campus of what was once Atari's headquarters, Warshaw describes a high-tech Shangri-La. Ideas and pot smoke were heavy in the air, dress codes were lax and met sales quotas were rewarded with keggers. Atari was every Silicon Valley stereotype turned up to 11.

The business side of the story is the most interesting and deserves more time and attention than Penn devotes. He digs deep into the New Mexico desert, but he barely scratches the surface of the 1980s home console bust. Going by Penn's account, one would think Atari existed in a vacuum. He gives us no hint of the other consoles on the market at the time, such as ColecoVision, Intellivision and Atari's designated 2600 successor, the Atari 5200. The crash of 1983 left a dark age of video gaming, the scale of which Penn loses with his myopic focus on the 2600. For two years, it seemed as if home video games had been just a fad. Then the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived in the U.S., and America has been a nation of gamers ever since.

Penn is far more interested in the New Mexico dig, and that's no surprise. He previously directed a mockumentary about another legend, "Incident at Loch Ness," aided and abetted by — of all people — Werner Herzog. Unfortunately, the off-putting persona Penn showcased in "Incident" is still on display. He interrupts the workers digging in the landfill to ask stupid questions just so he can film their incredulous responses. Whether staged or real, it adds nothing but irritation.

Yet for all the missteps and wasted opportunities, "Atari: Game Over" has its moments. Warshaw is a fascinating figure who has never gotten his due, and we get to watch as he comes to terms with seeing his past unearthed in a landfill. It's a powerful scene, and one that deserves a better movie.

No link can be found between crime and video gaming — again

I know this may come as a disappointment to some people, but when it comes to violent crime, you have less to worry about than a decade ago.

Why would good news like that disappoint anyone? Well, as it happens, there are people who have made their careers by trying to scare the rest of us. There is an entire industry of child psychologists, “public health experts” and lawyers whose livelihoods depend on Americans being scared to death that we are raising a generation of dangerous criminals reared on violent movies and video games.

The numbers, however, tell a different story.

According to FBI statistics released Monday, violent crime was down in 2007. That follows two straight years when violent crime increased slightly, but it also continues the overall trend since 1993, when the violent crime rate plunged for 10 years before leveling out and remaining mostly stable ever since.

You certainly wouldn’t get the idea that violent crime is falling or stable from watching a typical episode of “Nancy Grace” on Headline News. You might, however, think that “Grand Theft Auto” is turning the nation’s children into vicious gangsters with no regard for human life.

Yet while violent crime stubbornly refuses to skyrocket, more American children are playing video games than ever before.

A new study released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 97 percent of American children play video games. Now, I don’t want to seem judgmental, but if your child is in that remaining 3 percent, he is probably going to be shunned by his peers. You might want to invest in a Wii.

Not all video games are created equal, of course. While there are some child psychologists — I suspect they are shilling for the theme park lobby — who insist that all video games can turn children into snarling sociopaths, most of the focus is on violent games.

Well, fully half of the boys in the Pew survey listed games rated either M (mature) or AO (adults only) among their favorites. That means efforts to keep M and AO games away from children have failed miserably. It also means it doesn’t matter. Mature and adults-only video games aren’t creating delinquents any more than comic books did during the comics scare of the 1950s.

As a rather antisocial person, I don’t regard “civic engagement” as a particularly great thing. Still, for those of you who do, I have good news: The Pew study shatters the conventional wisdom that video games make children into antisocial hermits.

The study found that the young people who spent the most time playing video games were no less likely to be involved in their communities than the young people who spent relatively little time gaming. That surprised even me because you would expect some sort of trade-off. But whatever it is gamers are giving up to have time for their video games, it doesn’t appear to be community involvement.

As an aside, do you think that when books were invented, people worried about books making children antisocial? There’s no more solitary activity than reading.

Ultimately, despite claims to the contrary, no study has found hard evidence that watching or participating in violent entertainment leads children to be more violent. The studies claiming to find such a link don’t account for the fact that naturally violent children might be drawn toward violent games.

There are, however, studies that have found children are more aggressive right after playing violent video games or watching violent movies, but that effect is only temporary. It’s nothing that would lead to an increase in violent crime, which is why there isn’t an increase in violent crime. And it’s no different than the increased aggressiveness most people experience right after watching an exciting sporting event. Anything that gets you excited is going to make you temporarily more aggressive, whether it’s “Halo 3” or the Auburn/Alabama football game.

Personally, I tend to become temporarily more aggressive after watching the evening news.

Culture Shock 03.29.07: Wii breaks the mold for video game consoles

After years of being an also-ran, Nintendo is riding high again with its new Wii video game console, which has become the must-have system by breaking all the rules.

Gamers can be fiercely partisan when it comes to their favorite game systems, so I'll start by saying I don't have a Mario Kart in this race. I haven't owned a console game system since the Atari 2600, and the last PC game I bought was Diablo II. My idea of a killer application is Pitfall.

I know. I'm showing my age.

Currently, sales of Nintendo's Wii have outpaced by about 2-to-1 those of Sony's new PlayStation 3. In January, Wii sales also surpassed sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

How did Wii become the No. 1 game system?

It wasn't by beating PS3 and Xbox at their own game. Rather, it was by starting a whole new game. Wii hit the "reset" button in the console wars.

Before Wii came along, Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft were locked in an arms race. Each new game system was faster, more powerful and more versatile than the one that came before it. But after PS2 and the first version of Xbox trounced Nintendo's GameCube, Nintendo had to find a new strategy or risk going the way of Sega, which abandoned the console business after its Dreamcast failed to catch on.

That would have been a sad end for Nintendo's game console division, which had reinvigorated the home video game market in the mid- and late 1980s, after the early '80s Atari boom went bust.

But with Wii, Nintendo has changed the playing field. Wii forces players to get off their sofas and truly interact with the games. When you play Wii bowling or tennis, you're literally going through the motions of playing the game in real life. This has the added advantage of making game play simple enough for even the least tech-savvy player.

So, I wasn't really surprised to read a Reuters story last week about a retirement community where residents organized their own Wii bowling tournament.

When 80-year-olds are playing video games, something strange is going on. After all, these are people who didn't even play Pac-Man when they were young.

Wii making players more active participants in the game experience is a natural evolution. And we can see where it's heading — toward the sci-fi dream of virtual reality, in which players don't merely play a game, they're part of it.

Don't expect Sony and Microsoft to sit back while Nintendo gobbles up market share. They'll develop responses to Wii just like they came up with bigger and better consoles to compete with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES back in the 1990s.

Imagine a game with the intuitive, immersive game play of the Wii combined with the cutting edge graphics of the PS3. And if you can't imagine it, someone at Sony probably already has.

And when someone comes up with a role-playing or fighting game that plays like one of the sports games for Wii, Nintendo may find itself back on the defensive.

In the breakneck world of technological innovation, video game companies are the ones that can least afford to rest on their last big breakthrough.