Touring an exhibit of historic video games can inspire many different reactions in those who remember when they first came out. Wistful types may reflect on the days when wasting a few Martians was all it took to make them happy, while folks of a more practical bent will wish they had saved up all those quarters and bought stock in the company instead. But someone who grew up spending his spare change on baseball cards, who was so ignorant that he had to be told who Mario was, will end up feeling like George Bush at the supermarket checkout counter. In every direction, as far as the eye can see, spaceships explode in a hail of fireworks, libidinous blinking dots chase gyrating asterisks like satyrs pursuing nymphs, and abstract geometric shapes permute and change color in a riotous opium dream. And on the rare occasions when voices become audible above the cacophonous sound effects, all that anyone talks about is how primitive it all is.

The exhibit, regrettably titled “Cyber Playground,” has been assembled by an Atlanta museum called SciTrek and will be touring the country over the next two and a half years, with its first stop at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. The purpose of the exhibition is “to convey the history of the microprocessor using video games as a platform,” says I. J. Rosenblum, the exhibit manager, shouting to be heard over the buzzes, beeps, and bangs. Yet chip design does not seem to be the visitors’ main interest. The exhibit has thirty working games, and they are surrounded by what seems like a hundred times as many screaming children, all of whom want a turn at crashing the virtual cars and eviscerating the virtual bad guys. This raises what the museum staff calls “sharing issues.” It’s a warm, friendly phrase, and if Karl Marx had thought of it, his ideas would probably have gone over a lot more smoothly. As it happens, though, the exhibit’s sharing issues cause surprisingly little trouble.

Visitors play for free, but the more complicated a game is, the more likely they are to press the start button, poke idly at the controls for a few moments, and then walk away. As anyone who’s been a teenager understands, when you put your own money in the slot, you’ll do anything to keep the action going. When it’s free, by contrast, you have no incentive to waste time learning the subtleties of the more complicated games. There’s a lesson in all this, and it suggests that Marx might have had second thoughts about his whole program if he had dropped by his local arcade.

Because of this preference for simplicity, one of the most popular games is that paleolithic classic, Pong. Its original instructions read, in their entirety, “Avoid missing ball for high score,” and the game really is that simple. All you need to master it is to