Play Has Become More Personal and More Intense Through Technology

A similar trend is the rise of personal vacations and separate activities on family vacations. Children’s street games (such as marbles, Hopscotch, and hide-and-go-seek) have been replaced with video games. Face-to-face encounters have been transformed by e-mails, electronic chat groups, and web sur'ng. Revolutionary as all this may be, it represents the clear culmination of a century of developments in media technology.

Twentieth-century technology privatized and homogenized play, but it also intensi'ed it. &e intensi'cation took place on many fronts, involving everything from cars and speedboats to fast food and fad toys. Let me focus here on just a couple of examples: the thrill ride and the video game. Inventor La Marcus &ompson began this trend by introducing the 'rst modern roller coaster in 1884. Daring loop roller coasters appeared by 1900 in America’s new electri'ed amusement parks and, by 1910, improvements in safety led to the era of the mammoth roller coaster. In addition to the thrill of the drop and sudden turn on a whimsical track circuit, &ompson in 1886 also created for Atlantic City the scenic railroad with tunnels and exotic painted images of nature and fantasy. “Travel” here took on a whole new meaning. Bodily sensations that would normally have signaled danger or even death on a real train, as well as sights and sounds that would have required days of “regular travel,” were concentrated into a span of a couple of minutes.