PaigeFTW: The Value of a Game
You’re never too old to read a book or watch a good movie … but can you be too old to appreciate the craft of a video game?
I recently read a fairly incendiary article on Cracked.com (“4 Ways You Are Being Aged Out by the Gaming Industry”) that posited that games, essentially, have no cultural value and are an inferior form of entertainment compared to those stalwart mediums.
It’s worth a read, just for perspective, but if you’re reading this, you’ll hate that. But it did get me thinking about how easily we dismiss the triumphs of the art form.
Using Pong as a baseline, the gaming industry has really only enjoyed widespread appeal since 1972 — a mere 44 years compared to more than 100 years of film and actual centuries of books.
It’s a damn miracle, when you think about it. Less than half a century ago, we were pushing single pixels around on a black screen, and today we have something like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, where every blade of grass shakes with photorealism.
The average video game also synthesizes narrative — visuals, words and sound — with gameplay, adding a dimension of interactivity to every player experience. It’s a subtle but crucial reason why video games can achieve different things with narrative than any other medium.
And yet so easily is gaming lumped into a frothing orgy of violence and guns (or mindless repetition a la Candy Crush), as we dismiss a range of experience from the likes of the charming Undertale to the classic Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to the visceral The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
It’s a medium that requires a different kind of commitment, a different degree of patience and openness. It most certainly has its flaws.
But to say it is lesser than film or literature simply because it’s also a game? That a game could never change my life?
Son, let me just say: you’ve been playing the wrong games.
It’d be like basing all film off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows — a terrible mistake.
