GROWING UP CYBER

Picture the good old days of video games. Arcade games were still found in places other than seedy bowling alleys, and "Pac-Man" had his own T.V. cartoon. Formerly cool Atari was being phased out, and an upstart company named Nintendo was emerging. Even better, they were manufacturing something dazzling and new: 8-bit home video games. Crisper graphics, better sound and enough games to make you dizzy with anticipation!

To your hopeful eyes, the large box under the tree at Christmas promised hidden delights. Indeed, as you eagerly tore open wrapping paper, you revealed a gray compact box, two squarish, unwieldy controllers, a zapper gun, and the ultimate in cartridges: "Super Mario Bros." with "Duck Hunt." 8-bit utopia was yours! That first night, you tried desperately to shoot all of those damn ducks, and rescue Princess Toadstool from the clutches of the evil Bowser. In the soft glow of the T.V. screen, your face was radiant and peaceful.

David S. Bennahum '90 reflects that same sense of serenity in technology with his new memoir Extra Life: Coming of Age in Cyberspace. He portrays technology as the safe haven for teenagers whose lives might not be picture-perfect. Family and societal turmoil fades into the background while they take refuge in a computer lab. Complex but logical strings of programming code restore order and sense to otherwise tumultuous lives.

From a young age, Bennahum found solace in video games. Intensely lonely as an American growing up in France as a young child, his first taste with video games came as he vacationed in the French Alps with his family in 1973. Suffering from a sprained ankle, he discovered a new game called "Pong" in the hotel bar, and was mesmerized by it. "Who or what controlled my opponent's movements? What were the rules governing the flight of that square shuttlecock?" The reader can really feel how important finding a niche was to him through the simple yet emotional description of this discovery.

This intense curiosity sparked a life-long interest in the whys and wherefores of computers and offered an alternative to a real life that was less than orderly. When his parents went through a divorce after a move to New York City, Mattel hand-held games like football and car racing and the popular memory-testing game "Simon" were outlets that let Bennahum "hide from the experience of seeing once-powerful adults falter." In his high school computer lab he explains how users there escaped to a virtual world free from, among other things, divorces, remarriages, and troubled siblings.

Indeed, Bennahum describes how the social and familial element of computers took off in the early 1980s, a movement similar to how the Internet and email have revolutionized communication in the 1990s. Underground BBSes (bulletin board systems), which were most times run by people out of their homes, contained illegal software to download. The precious phone numbers of these BBSes were passed around among friends in a sort of Underground Railroad of computer users. His high school computer lab was a close-knit community where more experienced users shared their knowledge with younger users eager to soak up their expertise. Information was not withheld for selfish reasons, but disseminated among everybody in order to spread computer intelligence. His prose makes a family concept continually come to mind throughout the middle of the book, which humanizes a cold technology.

Technology is identified as the thing that kept him grounded and out of trouble. His descriptions almost deify computers and give them higher powers. Only when he lost interest in computers as a 12-year-old because he was in "a rush to get older," did his life take a crooked turn for the worse. An innocent cigarette addiction picked up while playing "Space Invaders" in his local arcade turns into a dangerous real-life video game where "points were gained by taking chances that others wouldn't. Doing drugs gained points; stealing gained points; blowing things up gained points; going further with girls gained points."

However, when the game spun hopelessly out of control, computers again arrived to rescue Bennahum. For his Bar Mitzvah, his dad promised him any gift if he would not invite the friends who got him into trouble. He followed his Dad's advice, and, moreover, he cut ties with them. Thus he received an Atari 800 with 48K of R.A.M. and a dual floppy disk drive. It was a turning point in his life: as his interest in computers grew throughout high school, his grades rose in direct proportion.

The parallels the author draws between the world and computers are fascinating, especially those on why computers were so appealing to teenagers. In a sense, teenagers of that time and computers grew up together, experiencing the same growing pains. "Together, computer and kid existed in a golden age, a time when the machine was available to us unconcealed, stripped to its component parts, when adults barely understood what we were doing...for the Atari generation the evolution of the machine briefly matched that of our adolescent selves, becoming a vessel and partner, a coconspirator in our mutual coming of age."

The book only drags in places where Bennahum describes the technical logic behind his beloved computers. While interesting, most of the information would go right over the heads of people unacquainted with the machines. Additionally, while information about his family and home life is plentiful early on in the book, later appearances are sporadic, and sometimes seem out of place in the flow of the story. His earlier years through high school are explained in great detail, and the book seems to hurry to a conclusion, glossing over college and his years after graduation.

As a snapshot and a chronicle of the technological revolution of the 1980s, Extra Life does a magnificent job. In today's high-powered, electronically driven world, it's hard to fathom a time when a dual 5-1/2" floppy disk drive was a luxury. But Bennahum takes us back to the good old days of home technology, when a simple game with plumbers from Brooklyn captivated a nation and ushered in a new era of living. Game over? Not hardly, when there's always the opportunity for an extra life.