I haven’t done an opinion piece on gaming in a long while, so brace yourself. I love gaming. I love everything about gaming. I love practically all genres of games. I was exceedingly happy when gaming started to become more widespread and slowly evolved into a culture. But there are a couple of things that tick me off.

I’ve noticed that most of my gamer friends are exactly like me in some respects. We were the ones outside playing imagination games at recess, pretending we were power rangers and darkstalkers and just generally blindly running around and having fun. We weren’t really playing basketball or four square, or sitting on the slide playing with each other’s hair. I had toys that I played with when I was alone, sure. I had a tribal society of Littlest Pet Shops. I built them a village where they held council. I loved my toys. But more often than not if a friend was over, we were playing an imagination based game.

The thing is, we got older and the need and desire for imagination in society faded. It was suddenly uncool to want to pretend you were some great knight or what have you. Studying replaced the tribal toy council. Going to the mall, listening to Spice Girls (in my case) replaced the desire to go to a park and pretend we were dinosaurs. I know a couple people reading this are probably feeling that slight pang of sadness that I feel when I write this. Yeah, you remember it too. Those days when you would run home with flushed cheeks and your voice hoarse, where you would exclaim, “They let me be the Red Ranger this time!” and your mom would reply, “That’s nice dear” are sorely missed.

Me, specifically, I started to write and draw. It was a nice creative outlet, but I wasn’t winning any awards if you catch my drift. For some reason my mom was hesitant to enter my triangle people drawings in any sort of art contest. Slowly, year after year, video games also started to fill in that gap as well. The original video games were graphically unimpressive, but I kind of liked it. Enough imagination and you could fill in the features yourself. Some of you are nodding, aren’t you? Yep.

Video games were like a way to relive those fun, imaginative adventures in a way that society found just slightly less disturbing than a teenager running around outside screaming about saving the world.

Video games have since evolved to a level that I doubt anyone originally expected could be possible when they were in the arcade jamming on pac-man. There are massive online video game worlds where you can be anyone, anything. Those imagination fueled landscapes and story-lines, they’re practically real now.

I get a little annoyed when someone claims that gamers shouldn’t take any pride in video game related accomplishments. The claim is that they amount to nothing in the real world. “Oh you beat super mario? Meh. That’s not going to win you an award.” or “Oh you got your stormwind rep to exalted? Big deal, see if it gets you a job.” I mean yeah, that’s true, but to the people playing the game, to us, we aren’t doing it for anything else than our own sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. We don’t care if beating Final Fantasy Tactics isn’t going to go on our college applications. We still get that tingle of thrill down our spines when we see that boss drop for the first time, just like we did ages ago when we were on the playground.

I know a lot of people don’t get it. Video games are for recreation, it’s true, and mean scratch in the real world, but please. We’re not hurting you. We’re not coming outside and punching you in the gut while screaming about how we beat Bowser. What’s the point to the belittlement? We enjoy ourselves and our supposedly meaningless accomplishments, and they mean something to us, and that’s all that matters really. What it comes down to is that nobody should tell anyone else how to feel. If someone is happy over something, don’t tell them they should be mad. Same with the flip side, if someone is mad, it’s not really your business to be telling them they shouldn’t be.

Now the second thing that annoys me. If the phrase, “I’ve never played _________ but…” has come out of your mouth (or keyboard) and then was followed by a massive negative criticism of the game design/engine/etc. or the entire game itself, please sit back and realize how silly you sound. I’m not talking, “Oh I wish they hadn’t put this character in Brawl.” If you haven’t played, for example, the first couple of monster rancher games and then decide that they should take out the training system, what are you basing it on? You’ve never tried it. How can you criticize? I see this so much and it’s tragic. It’s all over YouTube. Comments like, “I’ve never played this game but the last boss looks sooooo stupidly easy that anybody can do it.” Well then, you do it.

Opinions on games are awesome, but at least base your opinion on experience like you would anything else.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 11th, 2008 at 6:19 pm and is filed under Video Games, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.