Friday, November 17, 2006
12:35 PM
Well, to you-know-who-you-are, who is seemingly concerned for my obsession with FF12 and therefore gaming, suddenly voiced her opinion about games in general and how it is unhealthy etcetera.
Well, good good job to you, because you've made me think a little more than I usually bother to.
Over the last couple decades, video games have strayed away from their roots of family-orientated entertainment and has become the bastard child of the entertainment world. Despite making more money than the film industry or the sex industry or even the porn industry for that matter (okay maybe not..) video games are still seen as childish, lame, stupid and generally associated with geeks and nerds. But since everyone watches TV anyway, wouldn't it be natural to assume that it would be most fascinating to be able to interact and control the movements and actions of characters on a screen? Or maybe most of our population is just too messed up to be able to comprehend that level of thought and processing and would just rather sit on their fat lazy asses and just take in some movie shit created by a random stranger who they dont even know, suck it in like a fat american kid gulps in mayo (pardon the stereotype) and say its good stuff, burping happily, patting their stomachs and enjoying the hazardous pile of gunk that has just slid down their throats.
Really, how much worse are videogames compared to movies and oh lets say watching cartoons and animation? I think its far worse watching some dumb serial and being hooked onto it, eventually selling our your lives and property just to watch the dude who starred in it in a concert or something. Seriously man, thats pretty stupid too. Take my sis for example (sorry sis!) who watches these jap guys such as
KATTUN and
TACKEY&TSUBASA. Notice how they spell everything in caps. And notice just how motherf(rea)king gay they look. Clearly a large selection of the female population is deaf to the cries of the slightly more sane guys, because my sis can go off food for months just to order in a poster on these guys, or spends all her cash on their CDs etcetera. And yet my mom still whines about my unhealthy obsession with gaming. Yeesh go figure.
The problem is that the video game industry has successfully backed itself into a corner by slowly whittling down its target audience down to a nerdy, socially-inept elite(or not) and predominantly male slice of the population who often brand themselves with clan-tags like GOZU or DODA (Demons Of Dota Allstars. Yes I agree. Wth?how lame can you get?)
Like demonbaby says, most mainstream games involve guys in big metal space suits zapping aliens, or military soldiers blasting Nazis, or medieval warriors slashing goblins, or thugs popping caps in asses of rival gangs. It's so narrow in scope, and so streamlined to the specific interests of mouth-breathing fourteen year old boys, you almost want to lather Oxy cream on your Xbox.
On top of that, modern game developers have made games harder to play and more unwieldy to navigate, thanks to controllers with two analog sticks and dozens of buttons and games that require numerous complicated uses of said buttons. For the nerd elite, it's no problem at all, but for someone who hasn't picked up a controller since god knows when you might as well be asking them to pilot a jet aircraft. Even I - card-carrying member of the nerd elite - no longer have the patience to sit with a game like
Splinter Cell and learn thirty two different button sequence commands that regularly change depending on what's happening in the game. I don't have a lot of time for video games anymore, so I want something I can pick up and have fun with right away.
But back to the point, which is this discrimination against seventeen year olds who spend most of their time in front of said console, how is it then any worse than the aforementioned sister of mine who lives life with the japs on her computer screen? (okay maybe thats a little harsh haha..)
While I'm not out here to bash your favourite superstar or tv show or whatever, its just not right to critique us gamers for doing something ultimatly for enjoyment. After all, how UNHEALTHY can it get? Maybe varying cases of myopia, or is it time that could have been spent more PRODUCTIVELY thats always the argument? Well, lemme see, spending time parking our asses in some chintzy cafe and sipping expresso coffee that lathered with whipped cream and filled with tonnes of sugar, and talking crap that absolutely vets no impact on our lives but merely gives us some tangental and temporal enjoyment because we're spending time with our "friends", oohhh boy devilishly envious I am. Not that I don't quiteenjoy going out with my friends too, I do, but an overdosage of either and i'm ready to barf. It gets quite dumb sometimes, the dumbness that we perceive as fun and laughter and all the ha-ha-has. And it gets even better when you switch the environment to a fast food outlet like our favourite macdonalds, where the fats you consume readily transport themselves to your buttcheeks and stay there for all eternity, cushioning your almost invisble hipbones for more chats in the near future! Yayness for all!
that was rather like a rant.
