Before anyone runs to Jack Thompson to use me as an example of games being a bad influence, allow me to explain. Gaming has been a staple of my life since childhood. Back in the days of blips and bleeps and tiny little pixelated characters, I was an unusually impressionable child. I watched movies like The Changeling and The Amityville Horror, and attempted to play some of the more grisly games that were allowed at the time. Like a suicidal moth to a particularly hot flame, I would just keep going back without realizing the potential long-term damage I was doing to my overtly fragile psyche.

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“Hey, whatchya doin’? Playing a video game again? Is that all you do in your spare time? Yeah, I know you have a job, whatever. What do you even have to do in that thing anyway? Shoot people and smash buttons? …And dodge ‘counterattacks’? Strategize—wait, you actually think about this game?”

Really, we’ve all heard it at some point. Playing video games makes us lazy. They’re nothing but simple time-killers akin to watching a sitcom or doodling in a notebook. Truth is, it’s not so easy. Unless you want it to be.

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Beating games is the easy part. What? It is. Following the linear storyline and fighting the end boss, gathering all the necessary items or whatever it takes to unlock the final cut-scenes. Obviously there are some notable exceptions: Nobody would consider the credit rolling scene during K.K. Slider’s songs to be the ending of Animal Crossing. But the fact remains, most games require a bare minimum of effort to get to any of the plot points including the ending.

Side-quests are added in for a reason. A lot of the fun element in games is challenging yourself to get higher scores, better endings, or new outfits. Gamers have also been inventing ways to challenge themselves for decades. Who out there doesn’t have a 100% Zelda: Ocarina of Time save file? A better question: Who out there has actually taken up the three heart completion challenge? Significantly fewer people.

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Is plot important to a video game? Tetris managed without it, Sim City is hardly the stuff of novels, and Sonic revolved around a blue hedgehog and an egg-man. Plot was often consigned to the manuals for earlier games, whilst fighting games, racing games and shooters needed only the thinnest of excuses to send you into the fray.

The first games that featured imaginative story were the text-based adventure games. The first adventure game I ever played was an Atari game called Lords of Time. Featuring excessive amounts of time travel and the collection of several ’symbolic items’, the puzzles were horrendously difficult, but the story implanted in me a love of puzzle games that has never faded - although the genre itself sadly did.
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Don’t you just love the cell phone in GTA IV? I’ve only played about an hour of the game, but I’m already in love with that feature. It is, of course, just one aspect of many. A small thing. But then it is the attention to detail, the sheer loving polish on a game, that elevates it above the crowd. You can find driving games, shooting games, and gangster games anywhere. You can’t find one with a cell phone that works as well as that though. I haven’t accessed the GTA IV internet yet, but I’ve heard it’s hot stuff - and another incredibly detailed piece of work.

When we think about the great games - the games that we replay long after the graphics are dated and the game play is old hat - it is usually some small thing that we remember. For example, take my favorite game of all time. Final Fantasy 7 had a lot to recommend it, but the thing that stood out to me was the fact that every character had an individual walk. Tifa had a bit of a mince, that belied her martial arts expertise, whilst Cid had a macho stride that made him look rather stupid when he ran. Vincent was acrobatic as hell, whilst Yuffie was a lanky teenager. The walk bled over into everything, their gestures when talking, their victory dance, and it even helped show Cloud’s change of character post-OMG-I’m-not-Zack.

For a sprite, that was some pretty incredible acting.
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I love to reminisce about the good old MIDI gaming days. The days when I would play an RPG and obsess over midis. There’s some part of me, deep down, that still loves those clangy, high pitched musical notes. Even after I buy the instrumental CD or what have you. I loved games like Thousand Arms, that had an in game jukebox. I could sit and listen to that thing for hours. Admittedly, I never enjoyed the terrible electronic music from those hilariously bad tiger hand-held games toys. Even I have to draw a line somewhere.

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