#91 A Joyful Noise

So the other day I’m reading this newspaper article. And it’s talking about the reporter playing this new video game and how realistic the graphics are and stuff. Realistic graphics. It’s always seemed like a strange quest to me. Make cartoons look more and more like the real thing. Dumb. The more they’re like cartoons the more we can let our fantasies roam and still keep in mind they’re only cartoons. I mean seriously, how many child psychologists and social workers would be up in arms about “Grand Theft Auto” if it was the Roadrunner and Wiley Coyote? And though things like Grand Theft look realistic to you and normal me, the kids are only concerned about how the figures depicted in these games respond to their joystick. The figures could be stick figures for all they care as long as the response to the button push or the toggle touch was instantaneous.
And I’m sure I won’t make any parent friends when I say this, but using a remote game control is a hell of a lot different than pointing a real gun—even if your control connects you to a video image of a real gun. One of my sons is a paintballer and he can tell you, his online paintball is a lot different than his real world paintball. For one thing, when he throws his clothes in after the video version, it doesn’t screw up a load of laundry.
Kip Kinkle didn’t come from video games, any more than he came from Elvis’s rock music or Benny Goodman’s hot licorice stick jazz.
But anyhow, off my soapbox here. What got me thinking was the word joystick. From whence came this particular Freudian vocabulary addition? What was the alternative to the word joystick that was superseded? What was it that made joystick stick? All new words have to elbow out other contender words for describing the same thing. Like the term mouse pad beat out the term mouse mat. So I grabbed my dictionary. By chance I happened to notice the publication date of this reliable old tome of mine; 1975. Uh oh. That explains why I couldn’t find the word shizzle the other day. I didn’t hold out much hope for joystick either. I mean, 1975 was the day of disco, the day of “Space Invaders” and even “Pong” was yet to be.
But I was surprised. The word “joystick” was there and its definition was “control stick of an airplane.” Oh ho! So it was a top gun kind of thing. Wild testosterone-fused flyboys soaring through high-G loop-de-loops and barrel rolls and holding on to their joysticks for dear life. It was joystick long before there was ever a pimple-faced teenager yanking it around interacting with a world of realistic cartoons. Now where did that whole mouse thing come from?
America, ya gotta love it.