Interest or Hobby?

Part of the joys of work is that you interact with people of different ages and this can lead to some interesting conversations. I got talking to a gentleman who is a few years younger than myself who has an interest in videogames. Aha, I thought, this could be enlightening. It was, but not necessarily in a good way. You see, whilst he has fifteen years of console and PC gaming to his name, he has very little awareness of the history of his chosen hobby and, more importantly, no interest at all in expanding his knowledge. His is a transitory hobby, whatever new thing is in front of him is either great or shit. There are no levels in between these two extremes, just a binary yay or nay. So me being me, I raised this question: "Is this a hobby or an interest that you have?"

Now we each have our own approach to our hobbies. Indeed, how we approach a hobby defines that hobby's appeal to us (so the history and design of console hardware is of particular interest to me as an off-shoot to actually gaming itself). In the case of this younger gentleman, his was almost proud announcement that he knew nothing of gaming before he started playing back in the early 2000's and had no interest in what had happened before then, even to the point of not playing games that were released on his first console before he started gaming. I wasn't particularly surprised but it was quite saddening to hear.

The gentleman's first console was the Sony Playstation 2. A fine piece of hardware that hosted some of the best games of its generation, but my colleague expressed a narrow minded view that other console hardware released around that time (the sublime Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo's under-appreciated GameCube and the ground breaking original Microsoft X-Box) didn't matter because the PS2 won the sales war and as the other three lost, they didn't matter. As he wanted the best (in popularity at least), all other alternatives were discarded. Once the PS2 was replaced by the PS3, the older hardware was discarded and the games collection sold on. They were now old and of no further use. The latest was now, in his mind, the greatest.

A classic of its time.

Horses for courses I suppose, but then I have always been a collector (or hoarder as my better half would have it). Since the last house move, I have sold on most of my collection due to space issues but I did keep a few titles that have never been replicated since their original release. For example, Sky Odyssey for the PS2. The aim of the game is to pilot your aircraft successfully from A to B, encountering various obstacles and challenges along the way. There is no shooting, no whizz bang explosions, just pure flying. This title was in some way a slightly more realistic spiritual successor to the "Pilotwings" series that had releases on the Nintendo SNES (1990), the Nintendo 64 (1996) consoles. That such titles are few and far between demonstrates their sheer niche appeal and since then, only the lightweight Pilotwings Resort, released for the Nintendo 3DS (2011) has offered anything similar in the flying genre. I know Pilotwings Resort is lightweight by the fact that I have played both of its predecessors. Sky Odyssey, by the way, is still a great experience today and well worth a try if you can pick up a copy and have the hardware to play it on.

But what really made me think was how shallow my young colleagues approach to his hobby was. I struggled to bring together the two ideas of loving a hobby but having no knowledge or interest in anything outside of your own sphere of experience. In fact, he wouldn't countenance any move to expand that knowledge - it's old and therefore it's shit. That attitude, it must be said, is not just limited to videogames. Wargaming also has a similar issue.

Now, to be fair, I am not going to be tarring everybody with this brush, but lack of knowledge seems to be a badge of pride, and not just for the younger generation. Without a depth of knowledge in your hobby, how do you put what is current market offering into perspective? How can you judge any perceived improvements when you have no background on the subject you are purported to enjoy? That was evident when, at a show a couple of years back, one guy wanted fighting camels for his forces. When told they weren't used for that during the period he was fighting, he replied "It doesn't matter, you can still put them on the table." Historical wargaming indeed!

Back to my colleague. As gaming to him doesn't exist prior to 2002, he has never, and proudly claims will never, play classics like Command and Conquer, any LucasArts point and click adventure, Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Resident Evil, Half Life and countless other titles because they don't matter. Yet without those titles, we wouldn't have the games we have today. True, time has not been kind to most of these, but some have aged well and to miss out on those today, if you are a gamer, is a crying shame.

From a wargaming perspective, I'll use Team Yankee. I like them for what they are (and the chance to tinker with them at will adds some of the depth that a hobby needs), but subjectively, how different is the core mechanism from Operation Warboard? Or Featherstone's rules? Not much, but because TY has shiny hard-backed rule sets with lots of pictures, they are perceived by quite a few gamers as better - and that is a conversation I had at the Durham show this year where I ran a demo game. It also revealed that most of the people who asked questions about my amendments (which were based on my reading of texts both modern and contemporaneous) had taken what was offered in the rule sets as sufficient knowledge of the period - further reading was something that seemed like an anathema to them. Woe betide anyone (i.e. me) to use actual knowledge to dis-abuse them of their ignorance. Hey ho.

Take your pick...

Personally, I don't follow the "newer is better" mindset - after all, I am typing this on an 18-year old Alphasmart 3000. Yes, there are new niche text entry products (looking at you, Astrohaus) but I'm not willing to spend a few hundred quid on something when a more convenient (and cheaper) option exists. The same can be said for wargames rules - our recent attempts at playing Charge (I picked up a re-print at Salute this year for my own perusal after the first kicking I received) and other older rule sets have been interesting. They don't have lots of pictures or specialised kit, but they do the job and (this is important) they follow the historical period they model. Certainly compared to some more modern rules (Black Powder, Pikeman's Lament and others), the older set's adherence to history is refreshing, possibly demonstrating how far the modern wargaming market has lost its way from historical knowledge and focuses on rolling lots and lots of dice.

It does make me wonder if we are moving to a point where the history and context of any particular hobby no longer matters to the individuals partaking in that hobby. Whilst people may demonstrate a breadth of knowledge, there is so little depth that the individual misses out on the richness that makes a hobby enjoyable. Without that depth, could the hobby be classed as such at all? Is it not just then a passing interest? Also, without context, how do you judge whether the latest rule set/game/whatever is an improvement on what came before or just a money making enterprise by the creator and will it enrich your enjoyment of your hobby? As far as hobbies go, surely this is a bad thing?