The things you see

Playing a game like Pengo that has regular short breaks built in offers some good people-watching opportunities.

It’s always endearing to see the wistful smile and the faraway look in the eyes of people - around my age or younger - who first come across the museum’s four arcade machines.

Always with kids in tow, they (both fathers and mothers) invariably tell them how they played these machines at their local arcade or milk bar when they were kids, and how expert they were in their prime. They then proceed to sit down and show their kids just how it was done - sometimes re-telling stories of the glory days of their mis-spent youth. Actually it’s a bit like the stories I told my kids when I first came across these machines a few weeks back.

The difference is that I’ve not yet seen a repeat player. Unlike me, those people’s lives seem to have well and truly moved on!

A slightly less endearing happening is when passers-by, when they first see me playing, immediately and authoritatively declare to their kids that the game is Pacman. And others who occasionally offer some jocular comment to me - after watching me play for 20-30 seconds - about my obviously mis-spent youth. Yes, very funny, ha ha ha.

My favourite people-watching moment, though, has got to be when younger kids, who’ve probably never seen a classic arcade machine before, come up and start wiping their fingers on the screens of the adjoining machines. From the confused looks on their faces, they can’t for the life of them work out why they can’t get the characters to move like on their iPad games.

It’s happened about three times now - very amusing.