“Technology is magic. They’re wizards, doing what they do.” I had heard this kind of thing before. This particular time it came from a retired music teacher, during a discussion round a dinner table.
This is what I would normally say: there is no magic involved. Instead it is all long meetings, and hours of painstaking refinements. This time, however, I kept my mouth shout. Something was wrong — I was wrong. Technology had once been wizardry to me too. When had that changed?
The first glimmer of wizardry had come with our first home computer. I was about 6. At that point, my neighbour and I — like most young kids — wanted to be superheroes. Inspired by Christopher Reeves’ Superman, we would put curls in our hair, mistakenly thinking it would make us fly.
To my mind, this computer — which was strictly intended for work — was the next step in fighting crime. I had no idea what this whole ‘word processing’ malarky was, but I knew one thing to my very core: Word processing was my superpower! Maybe we couldn’t fly (curls be damned) … but we could sure combat our nemeses through the power of basic spell-checking.
Not long after came the first games machine. An Amiga 500. As with many people, games were my route in. That’s when the real awe and wonder began.
To be frank about the Amiga, it was a second rate machine. Most of its games ripped off more popular content on more popular devices. Zool would never be Sonic, no matter how hard they tried. On top of that, there was the relentless disk changing. Lemmings just plummeted off a cliff? New disk. Second half of a Sensible Soccer match? New disk. Next level on Rise Of The Robots? New disk.
None of that bothered me. Not even playing Rise Of The Robots. For a start, I loved the Amiga games — they were all I knew. What’s more, the Amiga’s lower-tier quality was part of its charm, like supporting a struggling football team. Any mention of an Amiga game in GamesMaster magazine was a cause of tingling excitement. “The Amiga has finally hit the big time.”
Of course, the Amiga didn’t hit the big time. It faded out of view.
There were other machines, and other games, and the wonders still came, albeit less frequently. Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VII, Street Fighter — they all had exquisite moments.
At some point, I made my own game — a basketball free-throw contest. Naturally, the graphics were basic: one basket, one backboard, one net, and a kind of browny-yellowy background which was meant to represent the wooden floor. The game play was even more basic. The player had to stop two moving basketballs — one going left-to-right, the other top-to-bottom — with two hits of the Space bar. If both balls stopped in the middle of their paths, the player scored.
The game was terrible, of course. There was no progression, or keeping score, or anything that resembled fun. But to this day, there are little details that I’m proud of. If you missed left, the ball would bounce left; miss right, and the ball went right. There was even an attempt at animation. Four frames which, when squinting, just about looked like the net had bulged.
With every new detail I added, I would feel more and more excited. I was learning the secrets. Now I was the wizard. I was Merlin the Tech-gician. And no, that name never caught on.
Despite this rush, I never made another game. I have no idea why. I probably found that coming up with ideas was hard, and I was really lazy.
But the magic wasn’t just in games. Soon enough, the internet came along. This was quickly followed by my musical education, in the form of Napster. For some reason I had never discovered John Peel, or anyone of that ilk. Napster — with its incorrect artist labels and terrible recording quality — was as good as it got. Each song would take half a day to download, which only added to the anticipation.
Then, it seems, the wizardry waned. Games were too time consuming. Downloading music lost its thrill, as it became commonplace.
As a student, I became ashamed of my interests. Telling a group of philosophy- and language-undergrads that I was studying Computer Science was not, at the time, a fast pass to popularity. Certainly not the way I was telling it.
The more I learned about the industry, the more the magic ebbed away. I started appreciating the craft that went into creating software, rather than enjoying the end results. I was like the comedian in the audience — full of appreciation, but unable to laugh because they had seen the joke coming.
Yet every now and then, tech has caught me by surprise. Google Street View, for example, seemed like a prank when someone first showed it to me. Surely no one could take, and organise, this many photos. Not even Google. The craftsman and the 6-year-old kid in me were both impressed.
I guess that’s the point. There are different ways to appreciate technology, none of which are mutually exclusive. Tech is both craft and magic. It is created by people who carefully tweak the finer details, so that their audience never has to worry about them. Yet it often inspires, excites, and — occasionally — frightens that very same audience. Wizardry comes in many forms.