The Career Game Loop

1How Gamers Learned to Choose

1.1 No Choice

Today, video games train us to make challenging career choices. But it wasn't always that way. It's taken a long journey for the video game to become a medium of choice making. Long enough, in fact, that nobody can quite agree when that journey began. Pull out a calendar and pick any year you like, from the 1960s to the 1970s to the 1980s, and there's probably a case to be made. Me? I choose 1983, at the Westown Cinema.

If you wanted to paint a portrait of my childhood in Waukesha, Wisconsin, you'd only need one color: gray. Winter began around November and lasted all year long. When I wasn't at home, bundled up from the cold, I was at school, bundled up from the nuns. With an hour a day of bland bible recitation and a dress code that made Mother Theresa look like a flapper, life indoors was just as gray as life outdoors.

And then, in 1983, the Westown Cinema arrived and lit my life with color.

Looking back today, I suppose the cinema's arcade was dark and dingy and unimpressive, with soda-stained carpet and only six or so games. But, to us tweens, that arcade was a neon heaven, blinking and beeping and blaring with fun.

At its glorious center was Donkey Kong.

Released in 1981, many cite Donkey Kong as the first “platformer” game. In it, you became “Jumpman,” a heroic carpenter who jumped over barrels and ran past gaps, climbed ladders, and smashed obstacles, in an effort to rescue his girlfriend, Pauline, from her captor—a giant, ...