Today I went back to twitter for more inspiration.
TheNoid13 wanted to hear about video games.
I feel that I’m a somewhat unexpected video game fan. I never played video games growing up, I didn’t get into them in high school, I really had no interest in them until college, when I started dating my amazing boyfriend, who is an avid computer and video game player.
For the uninitiated video gamer, there is definitely a learning curve. This can ruin the game experience for a spoilsport like myself. However, when you’re young, broke and without cable, the siren song of an adjacent xbox can really be compelling. Keep in mind that college is a special time in a young person’s life when an xbox isn’t hard to come by, but money for a matinee or a dinner not wrapped in paper is an extravagance too far.
Having acquired access to this new toy, and a library of games through the process of sexual conquest, I began my xboxing rather tentatively, but before long I was hooked. I’ve always been the kind of person that has difficulty watching television without something in my hands. All those years of knitting in front of the TV, bored out of my mind and I could have been playing video games. If only I hadn’t been so damn poor.
Video games solved all of TVs boringness problems by being completely better than TV in basically every way. No more watching helplessly as the protagonist does stupid tricks for my entertainment dollar. Now I’m the one doing stupid tricks, and loving every moment of it! Don’t like something? Shoot it. Can’t shoot things in this game? Then what the hell is it doing in this house?!
One of the best things about video gaming is that this is a completely new form of entertainment. Having born witness to the changes in the industry just since I started gaming is amazing. Everyone points to graphics and player interface as being the main things, but I think that we discount the writing at our own peril. Gamers are more likely to care about a story these days, and I don’t think it’s because we all suddenly discovered our feminine side.
The stories in games are becoming tangible in a way they’ve never been before. This isn’t Mario saving the princess, it’s not even the princess saving Mario. Game developers like BioWare (“Mass Effect,” “Dragon Age”) are taking games to a literary level, creating whole worlds and universes that you can save or destroy at your whim. We’re all familiar with the concept of a reader, a listener or a viewer, but the player is a new breed of media consumer. And as games become increasingly refined, many of us who never expected to will be adding that to our list of consumer credentials.