iPod Touch games changed the game industry — and our computer lab

My name is Zillennial. I was born on the border between Millennials and Gen Z. It is too soon to receive TikTok but too late for a Pandemic Stimulus Check. Look, somebody has to admit it. Computer labs are obsolete.

My first years at school were spent moving between the computer labs during the week. I followed the guidelines of my elementary school’s school. And, while it was easy to keep quiet as children would do, this meant that my classes had to follow the same routines. By the time I finished high school in 2016, my experience with the computer lab was over. Its uses were limited to standard testing, Adobe and Autodesk subscriptions. However, the history of computer labs is tied to gaming just as much as personal computing. This transition has had an effect on how and what we play.

In kindergarten I was the first person to use a computer at school. Individual desktops would continue to be a feature of my classrooms. What I did on that first desktop I mostly can’t remember. I loved coloring and educational games. In my elementary school’s first numbers grades, computers became something that we did after school. World of SandA pixelated chemistry simulation where pixels pour from the top and interact in the petri dishes of your desktop window was my favorite. Space InvadersIt was an important part of our lives, so we took turns in fifth grade. Cube RunnerFlash games and Flash animations during lunch at our class, which had three computers in the back.

Smartphones weren’t quite a thing yet, mind you. Although my fifth-grade teacher owned a new iPhone, it didn’t have an appending model number. However, most of our classmates had flip-top or sliding-screen phones. We also had handheld games consoles and the Nintendo DS. This was a common pastime during summer camp transportation. This was the golden age. Diamond PearlShare a Mario Kart DScart via DS Download Play. GameSharks available at Walmart. The DS wasn’t exactly very common. It was expensive enough that only kids who already played games had the handheld — and unlike home consoles, they were less likely to be shared across normative lines of who was considered a “player” or, as it may be, “gamer.”

Anyone could use the computer lab to play. When I was in middle school, in 2009 I found myself often in the library. Children gathered around tables to share their stories with friends, while others chose to sit in the corner where there was a row of computers that wrapped itself around themselves. You could access the games on any of the sites that were unblocked by clicking here. This was not a private space for games, but a place where everyone could see what you were doing and how it went. Please enter your email address gamed. This was a majority of browser-based games, which mainly featured puzzles and platforming. However, the more technical of us figured out how we could set up multiplayer matches within Flash-based games. Scorched EarthCloning TanksThe unofficial 3D light cycling game Armagetron AdvancedYou can also connect via LAN.

It is almost a idyllic memory of play, even if it’s accompanied by nostalgia. Before we knew anything about ludonarrative, it was a time when Minecraft was an incipient sandbox, and “the cloud” was hard to wrap your head around. In seventh grade, however, I quit going to school in the mornings for the library.

Sixth grade was the year I bought an iPod Touch. I was among a few friends who had first- or second-generation iPod Touches with headphone sockets, accelerometers, and storage of 8 GB. They were portable internet windows and gaming machines that we could use in our waiting rooms, waiting to be called, waiting to board the bus for field trips, in the hallways, before classes, waiting five minutes, waiting to hear the last bell ring or while waiting in line.

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Many of my classmates’ families had desktops of varying degrees of sophistication at home, but my house didn’t have Wi-Fi until I was in eighth grade, which meant I could only download Crazy Penguin CatapultOr the traditional indie shmup Space Deadbeef at home over a wired connection to my family’s desktop. Early Wi-Fi connections at school, in the public library, or at the mall weren’t going to cut it.

The iPod Touch was eventually commonplace, and middle school students started to take their iPhones to school. And because of their multipurpose nature, these devices were taken up by people who, as in the computer lab, weren’t already playing games. Although Apple and a multitude of mobile publisher startup executives hoped that the device would be a challenge to giant publishers such as Sony and Nintendo, it never happened. In part, that’s because this was never about “gamers,” but all the other people who play games anyway. And not unlike the arrival of consoles in the home after the decline of arcades, the iPod Touch saw gaming move again from a communal environment — the computer lab — to an individual experience on school buses or algebra class desktops, stuffed inconspicuously into backpacks.

The iPod Touch, described by Kotaku’s Ari Notis as a “herald” of the mobile gaming revolution, presaged the explosion of the medium over the past decade. It was a temporary device. The platform was quickly replaced with the more versatile smartphone in the next years. Computer labs were also less frequented at my school over the course of the year. My high school years were marked by the expectation that I would use home computers for my homework. In fact, virtual school classes became a mandatory part of my curriculum.

The computer lab and many of its games were lost with it. Websites forgotten, servers shut down, tech unsupported. The same would happen to the iPod Touch’s library when the App Store dropped support for 32-bit apps. Apple had even declared that the production would be halted in May. If the iPod Touch helped to kill the computer lab, or at least its cultural impact on gaming, we’re now a generation removed from that schism. But there is an addendum to the computer lab’s role in both education and gaming.

Perhaps you’ve guessed, I grew up somewhere in the United States. The 2010 iPhones were available to middle school students. The adoption of new technologies at school and in the home is greatly determined by wealth, and I was surrounded by it in the south Florida suburb my parents moved to in the ’90s.

While in college, I was a volunteer with the youth literacy program of Parramore, Florida. This is a historically segregated area near Orlando. I worked with elementary and middle schoolers in the neighborhood’s only school, serving the youngest kids who still fit the bill of Gen Z. This was the time of the Nintendo Switch’s rise, of Fortnite,A laptop could have been the replacement for a computer at home, or even replaced it with a television.

They lived across the street and I used to work there. I also visited their cafeteria one day, where I picked up my students. Orlando’s public school system could not be more different from my home’s. I’m not sure what their computer labs looked like, if their school still has or ever had them, but many of the students had school-issued touchscreen laptops they did homework, messaged each other, and of course played games on (or watched people play games on, as it were). Huddled around cafeteria tables, the tech provided access to play that wasn’t available to them elsewhere. Even though these experiences were personalized, the students had access to online play, could stay connected at home, and might even be able to make connections in chats or comment sections.

The spirit of computer labs lives on in this sense.

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