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The Nature of Video Games
It’s about how video games are. You don’t move your characters JUST to move your character, you move it to achieve goals. You move it to a destination that might require lightning fast reaction time and pinpoint accuracy on the way. You move it there to get to the next part of the story, to unlock a piece of the puzzle or to open a new part of the game.
This is something that outsiders do not understand. That the game is much like a sport. The sport, to someone who has never seen it before, appears nothing more than a group of running people chasing after the ball. If the sport is watched longer, the person will see that there is a GOAL involved with the rigmarole. The problem with spectators of video games is that the people who don’t understand oftentimes do not stay and watch for the goals involved.
This is partly the video games fault, for the goals in a good game are difficult and sometimes far apart to increase the amount of satisfaction for the player when the goal is achieved. This problem of not understanding the game is just as much the ignorant person’s fault. I do not use ignorant to malign, but to state a fact. Every time I hear someone talk about how they don’t ‘get’ video games, it makes me wonder how much effort they themselves put forward to understand.
A useful analogy to this point is found in the world of literature. If someone had never read or heard about Moby Dick before, then was suddenly dropped in the middle of the book to read one chapter. Unless this person wanted to, they’d never read the book from the start, to fully comprehend what is happening. This brings me to my next point: just as there are genres for books, so too exist genres for video games.
If you enjoy novels, or books with slow moving plots, there are an increasing number of video games where dexterity is not involved. At the moment many of these games consist of fantasy or sci-fi, but have great stories none the less. If you enjoy action packed books, there are many, many action games of every type and kind. Spy books? Oodles of games there. War books? Again, lots o’ games. Romance books? Well, no. That is more due to the fact that women, on the whole, do not buy and play as many video games as men do. This has been shown in many studies.
So before people say they don’t understand video games, they should pick a game, start from the beginning and play through. The experience might be enjoyable. It might be like a good book that grows on you. Because that’s how video games are.