Video games have been the great constant in my life since I unwrapped a Nintendo 64 for Christmas one year. Ever since that one glorious moment, I've never lived up to my potential. I have wasted hours, days, even entire weeks in imaginary worlds. I've since changed places of residence, schools, jobs, friends, interests, and identities countless times since then, but video games have always been there for me.
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| And if it wasn't for online Halo matches, I would have never found out about my mother's colorful past. |
Its really easy to see why- when it comes to entertainment, video games are very active. You get feeling of accomplishment from building a skill (never mind the skill is essentially worth as much as a hobo's alcohol tolerance) along with all the joys of taking a break from your current sucky reality and being in an objectively better one.
Case in point, I have yet to see a video game where hipsters exist and I don't murder them for points.
When you add in the fact that the Internet now lets gamers get all their social interaction via gaming, its easy to see why video games and their kin are pretty much the next wave in the entertainment industry: they satisfy all of your emotional needs. You get self gratification and social contact wrapped up in a nice package where you can forget about all the terrible failings and mistakes of your current meatspace life.
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| Playing video games for long enough will also remove you from ever having to deal with the pressures of starting a family |
However, its when games go above and beyond the call of duty (pun totally intended) and start influencing the physical world around us that things get way cool. Like, for example, a Doom 3 deathmatch used to settle a copyright lawsuit. Which is beyond awesome, for several reasons:
1) Futuristic warriors running around with shotguns and rocket launchers blowing each other up is about 200% cooler than anything related to copyright law ever.
2) This opens the potential for other legal disputes to be solved in this fashion, which would mean that all lawyers would need to log hours playing deathmatch against kids calling them "fatass nerdy thundercunts" with nothing they can do about it. If that doesn't drastically lower the amount of soulless attorneys, then I don't know what will.
However, there is the unfortunate counterpoint that if we let even one legal dispute be solved this way, the end result is that the world just gives up any and all sanity and becomes like the movie Rollerball, in which countries solves disputes not with war, but with teams of fucking combat rollerbladers.
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| The fact that anyone thought this was a good idea makes me wonder how anyone lived through the 70's |
It is not only in the realm of war that video games have managed to influence reality. They've caused love to-- especially when Portal 2 was used as a marriage proposal. Warning: This story is all kinds of sweet and adorable. Be prepared.
I dunno, I think I'd take some custom levels to Portal over a nice dinner any day of the week, honestly. Video games just seem to make everything better. Even the unholy-hell-according-to-sitcoms marriage.
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