Games and the mostly young people who played them would come to dominate Favaro’s years at Hofstra.Īs arcades and the Atari VCS grew in popularity over the course of those years, an anti-videogame hysteria grew in response.

One of the last things we said about video games that day was that they would be fun to study in some small research projects. I also wondered what kinds of motor and reflex skills the games were training in us. They took us away from the pressure of graduate school for a short time and gave us a chance to act out some of our competitive urges. In his first year as a graduate student of Clinical Psychology at Long Island’s Hofstra University, he and another student developed an obsession with the early standup arcade game Space Wars (a direct descendent of that granddaddy of all arcade games, MIT’s Space War).ĭuring one of the many psychological discussions which developed around those sessions, I wondered whether the games served some kind of therapeutic function for us.

Favaro started blending computers with psychology some eight years before Activision published his groundbreaking “life simulator” Alter Ego.

Alter ego game text