Generation Alpha: The Definitive Review

Or What I Learned From Hosting an After School Videogames Club

Having already exploited my after-school club for previous entries, I had some concerns about being so lazy that I’d write even more about it. As the result of ruminations after completing the term, I came to the conclusion that there was some value in bunging together a condensed piece on some of the deeper observations I was able to make. Particularly regarding the current generation of children and their relationship with the videogame. My club was initially structured as a serious history class, starting with an elementary Pong machine and an Atari 2600 alongside a Vectrex. For the next session we had a ZX Spectrum and a Commodore 64, then a SNES and Megadrive, Saturn and PlayStation, Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. Things got a bit bonkers after that as we merged in another 15 kids from another club that had to finish early, but it brought with it a teacher with an impressive Nintendo collection and a similar passion for forcing children to play old videogames. The thing is, it was never difficult. We had a real mix of children, genders, personalities and primary school ages. Youngest was five, oldest was twelve. And universally, they loved the games regardless of which generation they were from. The real pain came from convincing certain kids that their time was up and had to pass the pad. This became especially difficult once N64 Smash Bros entered the club, complete with four controllers. 

FINDING 1: GENERATION ALPHA DOESN’T CARE ABOUT OLD GRAPHICS

Visual fidelity had no bearing on the children’s’ enjoyment of the games. Even the rattily old Pong machine kept them entertained, to the point where one of the joysticks was snapped thanks to committed exuberance. For the 8-bit machines, they barely mentioned the graphical downgrades. But it’s too easy to forget that this generation’s entry point is the current gen of hardware; PS4, XBONE, Series X, PS5, Switch etc. They’re used to HD resolutions and megatexures of home consoles, not to mention the hypercolour ultra-snazz of mobile match-3s and themed endless runners. Because the best that can currently be offered is their default, they don’t see the degraded visuals of prior generations as inferior, because they don’t natively understand the retrogression. Instead, they see it more as a reduced code, an abstraction away from their norm. A tortured analogy to consider is to think of contemporary machines offering Pixar movies when these old machines play Hannah-Barbera cartoons. This was starkly demonstrated by the Vectrex. We had a rush between the end of the school day and the start of the club to set up all the screens and hardware. Popping a Vectrex on a table was a great way to get something up and running quickly, and I would always choose Scramble. The Vectrex version is arcade complete, but in the starkest lines you could imagine. However they glow with a singular precision that utterly captivated some of the kids. Plus the game is huge fun for gaming debutantes who’ve just discovered a love of warfare. That absolute minimalism was a virtue; the screen shows only what’s needed to play, no frills, no distractions. I think this made it an incredibly pure interaction for the young players, making focus all the more acute. A few generations along, the bold vibrancy and sheer velocity of Sonic the Hedgehog was equally entrancing, even if it meant infinite replays of stage one. Keeping with the blue skies motif, an intensely popular favourite across the whole club was Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast, its low-poly chunkiness charming the audience instead of offending it, perhaps proving the maxim that gameplay triumphs over everything (and that Sega is the best).

FINDING 2: EVERYONE NEEDS A CRT

I am lucky enough to retain a Panasonic 14in portable from 2001. It’s a little beauty, having a super-flat screen, composite input on the front panel and another SCART round the back, plus that (sometimes) vital analogue RF tuner. I was amazed at the attention it got, being almost as exotic as the Vectrex. The children were in love with the sheer vibrancy of the colours and the softness of the analogue display, plus it allowed the teacher, Jacob, to play his beloved NES Duck Hunt after several decades of collecting dust. Oddly, other teachers and parents were as charmed by the cathode ray tube as the children. But then the colours are just magnificent, glowing in a way that flatscreens don’t. More accurately, it feels closer to the difference between a real neon sign and an LED-spoofed one. For more analogue joy, I do actually use the tuner. I’ve tried everything I own that outputs RF, but always settle on the composite route. The only stalwarts are the 70s machines. I chose the 2600 to get the CRT for the club, because we were playing Breakout with a paddle, as it shows continuity from Pong. 2600 Breakout has a lot of multicoloured bricks and the 2600 palette looks gorgeous, especially when dipped in a bit of RF distortion. I mean, this is the way it was designed to be played, the correct way for it to be viewed. And I was struck by the thought that this combination of 2600 and a CRT is rarer than we might initially estimate. It’s all too easy to forget that working CRTs are a commodity now, a collector’s item. Incidentally one of the club’s oldest kids, who admittedly has a retrogaming Dad, wants a CRT for his birthday. I presume this means they will become extremely cool with teenagers in approximately three years.

FINDING 3: PERIPHERALS COUNT

Millennials and Gen Z were awash with custom peripherals in their childhoods. Fin-de-siècle dance mats for the PSOne, light guns, fishing rods, chainsaw controllers, train controllers, bongos and congas, a range of guitars, drum kits, keyboards, keyboards for typing, DJ decks, trance vibrators, Wii remotes, themed prop holders for Wii remotes, pretend Wii remotes for rushed, botched or amateurish attempts to bring Wii functionality to rival consoles, and for the SSS-rank final form, the Steel Battalion controller. The modern vogue has boiled it all down to two evergreens: the arcade stick and the steering wheel. You can argue there’s a universe of flight sim peripherals, but I’m not sure they sit as easily with console gaming as the wheel and stick. VR doesn’t count, really. That’s so much more than a peripheral. Regardless, poor old Generation Alpha is bereft of such delights. However, running a PlayStation 4 with a wheel, pedals and Gran Turismo Sport caused such a hubbub that physical violence nearly broke out over access. And this was just to drive round an oval in an MX-5. The real-world parity of the steering wheel carries a mystique that the arcade stick, which was the sole interface for the (utterly vital) M.A.M.E. PC, simply does not have. For Generation Alpha, the wheel is more seductive than a gun (the NES one, mind). Likewise, the children loved the Wii. Many had memories of using one, or still had one kicking about at home. But bung Ghost Squad on and suddenly everyone wants to shoot terrorists. THAT, MY FRIENDS, IS BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING AM2 MAGIC.

FINDING 4: NO-ONE LIKES PLAYING THE GAMECUBE

I put this down to over-supply, but Jacob and I had a four-player setup for Super Monkeyball going and we could only convince one child to play Monkey Race. It should be mentioned that it was fighting against the NES on the CRT, 4-way Smash Bros on the N64, Gran Turismo with the wheel, Final Fight in M.A.M.E., the Vectrex and, in a coup-de-grace, a fully-populated game of Mario Chase on the Wii U. We were in a classroom, which means it had a giant display on the wall that dutifully carries an HDMI in. It was pretty spectacular to watch, and the children absolutely loved it. I guess perhaps after everything, if the Wii U is only ever used to delight kids with Mario Chase, then perhaps it was all worthwhile. As for the GameCube, my error was obviously in forgetting to bring P.N.03.

FINDING 5: BOYS LIKE FIGHTING

Violence is the ultimate drug, and nothing spews violence at children like fighting games and out of convenience with a FreeMcBoot PlayStation 2 loaded with my faves, I put on Tekken 4. Perhaps the black sheep of the ancient Tekken lineage, I always loved Tekken 4 for its weird intimacy, bulky characters and close-quarters brutality. My only regret was that I didn’t commit properly with Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution and two arcade sticks, but it turns out I’ve lost one of the three I had, and one of them is far more valuable for M.A.M.E. In an unsurprisingly stereotypical manner, the boys were particularly obsessed with Tekken 4 and the natural order began to emerge. One of the older boys settled on a character and a handful of reliable moves in short order, so began to dominate. It was Yoshimitsu, perhaps one of the most appealing of the default characters for young boys. He glows and has a sword, right? Anyway, I had to teach him a lesson and after being completely pasted as Hwoarang, I jumped on the purple suit Kazuya train and opened him up like a fucking tin of beans. Wall-push > crumple > 4-hit juggle, lightning godfist was far too distant to achieve so I settled for a dragon-punching godfist-and-gut-punch counter game that made me feel a bit guilty afterwards, even though I dropped a round to try and be nice and fluffed most of my juggles. But you have to teach the scrubs that there’s an entire universe of technique beyond those three easy moves. 

C O N C L U S I O N N N N N

Don’t run an after-school club for videogames. Well, don’t do it for eleven weeks. But if you’re a collector who worries that your collection isn’t getting the workout it needs, absolutely do it. It’s profoundly nourishing to see a whole new generation engage with Miner Willy, or scream because they made a silly mistake and lost a point in Pong. Most of them don’t care about the history, but they love the objects and they love the games, even as tourist visitors rather than committed players. The engagement is wonderful, as is the youthful enthusiasm for such a wide, unexplored past. But there were so many anomalies; the demands that Crazy Taxi came back next week, the manic delight at bomb-cruising through a credit on DoDonPachi, the cross-cohort popularity of Scramble, the sheer feverish clamour for the Gran Turismo wheel. It let me grasp, in an instinctual and visceral way, the universalities of videogame play, those rudiments and constants at the core of the interaction, the feedback of reward for a risk well-spent. Speaking of risk, I really didn’t mind my vintage Pong machine’s joystick being snapped, because it was made of the cheapest plastic possible, and a superglue repair is all it needs for a Kintsugi survival. And that was the only injury, despite all the discs, the tapes, carts, pads. Most importantly, the club made me insanely popular with the rest of the parents and the teachers, meaning I can duck out of more grievously awful PTA activities in the future. But so many people had a tale to tell of a machine they owned or a game they loved, and their eyes lighting up when I offered to bring in that machine or load up that game carried a greater reward than any wealth of social currency earned. And again, this sense of universality and shared experiences across the generations feels so warming, so validating. I never harboured much guilt about living on the hoarder side of the collector spectrum, but running the club completely eradicates any uncertainties about the social value in doing so. And so, we’ll do it again in 2024. The research continues, though perhaps I won’t get enough material to throw together another report. I know one thing, however: I’m totally bringing P.N.03. 

Or maybe just make them all play Bujingai?

[21]