I recently found myself becoming annoyed while waiting for a video game to load. Not terribly annoyed. I wasn’t throwing the controller or threatening the television. It was more of a quiet irritation, the sort that emerges when a machine fails to recognize the extraordinary importance of whatever I’ve decided to do next. The loading screen had been visible for approximately four seconds. Four seconds! Apparently, this was now an unreasonable amount of time to expect a grown man to sit patiently while a computer assembled an entire imaginary universe for his entertainment. I wondered when exactly I’d become so demanding. After all, I’ve spent nearly my entire life waiting for computers to do something, and for most of those years, the waiting was just part of the adventure.
I grew up alongside home computers and video games, back when getting a machine to do something interesting occasionally required the patience normally reserved for international hostage negotiations. The Atari 2600 was wonderfully straightforward. Insert cartridge, flip switch, and suddenly you were playing a game that required approximately seventeen pixels and an extraordinary amount of imagination. The Nintendo Entertainment System offered similar magic, provided you could convince the cartridge to cooperate through whatever combination of blowing, wiggling, and religious ceremony happened to be popular in your household. But computers were another matter. My Apple IIc and later adventures in DOS required disks, commands, clicking drives, and occasionally the sacrifice of a small animal to the technological gods. We didn’t have instant gratification. We had conditional gratification, dependent upon the temperament of a machine that sometimes seemed to despise us.
I remember the early King’s Quest games, those marvelous adventures in which I could wander through pixelated kingdoms, solve puzzles, and occasionally die because I hadn’t typed precisely the correct combination of words. There was excitement long before the first character appeared on the screen. The machine was preparing something, and I was preparing myself. Of course, I don’t remember contemplating the nature of consciousness while the computer loaded. I remember wanting the damn thing to hurry up so I could discover whether Graham could climb a mountain without falling to his death. The great spiritual teachings of Sierra On-Line were somewhat overshadowed by the company’s enthusiasm for killing players who made perfectly reasonable decisions. Nothing teaches the impermanence of existence quite like losing three hours of progress because you walked too close to a cliff.
Then came the glorious era of connecting computers to one another through telephone lines. Before the internet became a place where billions of people could simultaneously argue about absolutely everything, I was dialing into bulletin board systems and listening to the unforgettable performance of a modem negotiating with another modem somewhere in the distance. The hissing, screeching, chirping, and singing sounded like two robots attempting to communicate while being slowly lowered into a vat of boiling water. And I loved it. Those sounds announced that something extraordinary was happening. My computer was reaching out into the world, and somewhere, another machine was answering. Each successful connection felt like opening a secret door into a place that hadn’t existed in my bedroom moments before. Dial-up internet only expanded the possibilities. Images appeared one little piece at a time, websites assembled themselves with theatrical reluctance, and downloading something substantial required a commitment of time that might otherwise have been spent earning a college degree. But the excitement was real. I wasn’t contemplating existence. I was waiting for the world to arrive. And if someone picked up the telephone halfway through, enlightenment was postponed indefinitely.
Perhaps the greatest test of technological faith was installing software. There was a particular anxiety associated with watching Windows install from a collection of floppy disks, observing a tiny progress bar advance with all the urgency of a geological event. Hours could pass while the machine copied files, requested another disk, and occasionally gave every indication that it might simply abandon the entire enterprise. Watching that bar reach 93 percent was thrilling, not because I had achieved some higher state of consciousness, but because I knew how much of my afternoon would be ruined if something went wrong. Ninety-four percent. Ninety-five. Ninety-six. At that point, you weren’t installing an operating system. You were negotiating with God, and God had requested Disk 7. A successful installation felt like a personal victory, even though your primary contribution had been inserting plastic rectangles and refusing to touch anything for fear of destroying Western civilization.
As technology advanced, the worlds we could enter became increasingly extraordinary. The PlayStation, Dreamcast, Xbox, and generations of Nintendo machines carried me through places my childhood self could scarcely have imagined. But progress didn’t always mean less waiting. Cartridges had once delivered games almost immediately, while the larger adventures stored on discs often required lengthy loading screens. The machines became more powerful, the worlds more elaborate, and sometimes the price of all that wonder was sitting patiently while a little symbol spun in the corner of the screen. Grand Theft Auto and countless other games taught us to recognize those symbols as temporary guardians of another world. Later, connecting to The Elder Scrolls Online could feel like waiting to board a plane. I wasn’t merely launching software. I was preparing to travel somewhere populated by dragons, ancient ruins, and other human beings who had decided that the best use of their evening was to spend several hours fighting an imaginary skeleton. A perfectly reasonable decision, in my opinion.
There was even a period when someone managed to patent a particular way of letting people play a smaller game while waiting for a larger one to load. Namco, the company behind Ridge Racer, held a patent covering a technique associated with its use of Galaxian as a loading-screen diversion. For years, other developers had reason to be cautious about using similar methods. Consider the magnificence of this achievement. Humanity had invented machines capable of simulating entire universes, discovered that those universes sometimes required preparation, and then developed a legal system granting exclusive rights to one way of making that preparation less boring. We had figured out how to own a method of entertaining people while they waited to be entertained. Somewhere, an attorney was presumably billing by the hour while an entire generation of children stared at progress bars. The patent eventually expired in 2015, by which point technology was steadily reducing the need for the very thing it protected. Magnificent. We’d managed to put paperwork between people and their imaginary worlds.
Eventually, faster processors, better storage, broadband connections, and increasingly clever software began eliminating many of those familiar interruptions. Games that once required lengthy preparations could now launch in moments. Entire worlds could be paused and resumed without repeating the ritual of entering them. And something peculiar happened. Our expectations changed. What once seemed remarkably fast became ordinary, and what once seemed ordinary became intolerably slow. A four-second loading screen could now irritate someone who had previously waited an entire afternoon to see whether Windows would successfully install. We’ve reached a point where a machine can simulate an entire planet, fill it with millions of objects, and connect us to people around the world, only to have its owner complain that the planet isn’t ready quickly enough. I suspect the machines occasionally wish they’d never bothered.
It’s tempting to see this as evidence that technology is ruining our attention spans. There’s something troubling about how accustomed we’ve become to instant access, endless stimulation, and the expectation that every desire should be satisfied immediately. But I wonder whether something else might be happening alongside our growing impatience. What if we’re simply getting used to a world where the distance between having an idea and doing something about it keeps shrinking? Perhaps we’re preparing ourselves for a future in which technology becomes so closely connected to our thinking that keyboards, controllers, and even screens begin to seem unnecessary. Artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces are already giving us glimpses of possibilities that would have sounded ridiculous when I was dialing into a BBS. Perhaps we’re approaching another great leap in how humans interact with the world, one in which our technology becomes less something we use and more an extension of ourselves. Or perhaps we’re just becoming impatient little bastards. I suppose both possibilities remain available.
But here’s where I start questioning all the nostalgia surrounding our lost moments of waiting. We sometimes talk about loading screens as though they were accidental meditation retreats, little gifts of enforced stillness that allowed us to contemplate the universe between levels of Sonic the Hedgehog. And perhaps they occasionally were. Maybe someone somewhere discovered the true nature of existence while watching a blue progress bar crawl across a beige monitor. I can’t rule it out. But after nearly half a century of waiting for technology to do things, I don’t recall a single philosophical revelation arriving during a loading screen. I remember anticipation. I remember excitement. I remember frustration when something failed. I remember getting something to drink, using the bathroom, and occasionally discovering that I’d forgotten to eat lunch. The closest I came to enlightenment was realizing that I should probably stop touching the computer while it was installing something. If these were spiritual retreats, the admission requirements were unusually low and the enlightenment rate was abysmal.
So why should I mourn their disappearance? If a game once took five minutes to load and now takes five seconds, I’ve recovered nearly five minutes of my life. That’s five minutes I can spend exploring another world, playing with my daughter, painting something ridiculous, or sitting in a chair wondering why there is something rather than nothing. Nobody is preventing me from contemplating existence just because my Xbox loads faster. In fact, I now have more time to do so. If I want to meditate, I can meditate. I don’t need a computer to temporarily refuse my request in order to discover the present moment. I have plenty of opportunities to experience frustration and helplessness without deliberately introducing them into my entertainment.
And yet, for all the time technology has given back to us, we don’t always seem to feel like we have more of it. We eliminate a delay and immediately fill the recovered minutes with something else. Another task, another notification, another opportunity, another expectation. A job that once took an entire afternoon can now be completed in five minutes, which is wonderful news until someone decides we should therefore complete twelve of them before lunch. We’ve invented machines to save time and then appointed ourselves managers of all the time they saved. Naturally, management would like to discuss our productivity. It’s a strange arrangement, and one that makes me wonder whether our impatience has less to do with loading screens than with the fact that we’ve somehow made being alive feel like an endless series of things we should already have finished.
But even here, I hesitate to suggest that doing less is necessarily better. We’ve developed an odd habit of treating stillness as inherently virtuous and activity as something requiring justification. If I’m enjoying an afternoon exploring a virtual world, why should that be less meaningful than sitting beneath a tree contemplating existence? Must I become a better person every time I pick up a controller? Can’t I occasionally just spend an hour fighting skeletons? Perhaps the wonderful thing about having more time is that we don’t have to justify how we spend it. We can create, explore, play, think, or do absolutely nothing. A person enjoying their life isn’t failing to meditate. They’re enjoying their life. And I suspect the universe is perfectly indifferent to whether they do so beneath a tree or while defeating a digital dragon with a sword they spent forty-five minutes customizing.
Which brings me to a rather serious concern about the future of humanity. For decades, loading screens provided a valuable public service that technological progress has failed to appreciate. They gave us time to pee. You could finish a level, watch the machine prepare the next adventure, and quietly attend to the biological necessities of being a creature composed largely of water. But as loading screens disappear, games become persistent, and our relationship with technology grows increasingly seamless, when exactly are we supposed to use the bathroom? If humanity eventually achieves direct neural integration with artificial intelligence, allowing us to explore entire digital universes at the speed of thought, will someone please explain when we’re expected to stand up and take a piss? I worry that our species is approaching its greatest technological achievement without having adequately addressed this fundamental design flaw. We’re preparing to merge the human mind with machines capable of extraordinary intelligence, yet the bladder remains stubbornly committed to its original operating system. Billions of dollars in research, decades of progress, and the final obstacle to human transcendence may turn out to be a middle-aged man who drank too much coffee.
Perhaps that’s what those old loading screens really represent to me now. Not some lost age of wisdom or patience, but a time when the boundaries between our technological adventures and our physical lives were a little more obvious. The machines needed a moment, and so did we. Sometimes those moments were enjoyable. Sometimes they were frustrating. Sometimes they were simply opportunities to refill a glass of soda before returning to another world. The waiting became part of our memories because it was part of our lives, not necessarily because it was making us better people. Nostalgia has a wonderful ability to turn inconvenience into cherished ritual, provided enough time has passed that we no longer have to experience the inconvenience ourselves.
I still love the sound of an old modem connecting. I still feel a little excitement when I see a progress bar moving across a screen. I remember the anticipation of watching a computer prepare something wonderful, the thrill of entering a world I’d never seen before, and the peculiar satisfaction of an installation finally reaching 100 percent. I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything. But I also wouldn’t trade my modern technology for the privilege of experiencing those delays again. I loved the anticipation, but I don’t need to spend three hours installing Windows to prove I’m capable of patience. Frankly, I’m not certain I was particularly patient back then. I simply didn’t have a choice.
Maybe that’s the lesson, if there needs to be one. We didn’t lose the ability to wait when our machines became faster. We simply gained more opportunities not to. What we do with that freedom remains entirely up to us. Perhaps we’ll spend it creating extraordinary things, contemplating the universe, or playing video games with our children in worlds that would have seemed impossible to our younger selves. Or perhaps we’ll find new things to wait for. That seems like a particularly human possibility. Give us instant access to nearly all recorded human knowledge, and we’ll still spend half the morning wondering why our coffee is taking so long to brew.
As for me, I’ve got a game I’d like to play. An enormous imaginary universe is sitting just a few button presses away, waiting to be explored. Thousands of years of human ingenuity, decades of computing progress, and the accumulated brilliance of countless engineers have made this possible. All I have to do is press a button.
Assuming, of course, that the damn thing doesn’t take four seconds to load. And maybe I should pee first.