A Gym For The Mind – Video Games and the Unfair Stereotype
Hands up if you have heard someone say “Those video games are no good – they rot the brain and poison the mind”, or something that approaches that attitude in terms of an emotive response to video games. Now, put your hands back down. Put your hands up if you regularly play video games and have found that the game frustrates you because it poses a problem you cannot work around. Now, do you see the point this article is about to make?
The assertion that video games prevent people from broadening their minds and even work to retard the brain in some way is an idiotic one. Let’s think about this for a minute. So many of the games out there on the market require the player to think about what they are doing. Each has a quite logical pattern which can be followed by the gamer to get them to the next level. They very much encourage logical thinking rather than retarding the brain.
Of course, there will be some people who when playing a video game simply run around the (virtual) play area shooting everything that moves and, when they find something that doesn’t move, shooting it until it does. Even this does not mean that they are rotting their brains. Certainly no more so than reading a book which has a murder in it every other chapter. Of course, one of these two will always be seen in some people’s eyes as enriching their intellect – and there are no prizes for guessing which.
Beginnings to Immersive Experiences and Active Participation in Video Games
The rise of sports simulations on video game consoles started a few decades ago, but the advances that the medium has made since then are quite something to behold. There was a time when whatever sport you enjoyed, playing it on a video game would be somehow unsatisfying. Unless your chosen sport was golf, it was incredibly hard to make players and conditions anywhere close to lifelike. You can aslo read about True Classics and the Unfulfilled Promise of Virtual Reality Gaming by visiting https://quinta-anita.com/true-classics-and-the-unfulfilled-promise-of-virtual-reality-gaming/
Once you discovered a way to hoodwink the computer player’s defence, you could rack up as many goals, touchdowns or baskets as you like, and scores would end up unrealistic and a little bit boring.
Video game software houses were no less aware of this than the gamer, and with every new release – for a sports game franchise is nothing without an annual update – they have added to what you can do. It used to be the case that an NFL simulation game had you controlling one player on offence and another on defence, and that was it. Now you can be general manager, head coach conditioning co-ordinator and much more besides. A little confusing and overwhelming for a first-timer but blissful for the stats junkie.
Of course, there are now consoles which even let you participate more actively. Boxing uses controllers which you hold while “punching”, and tennis which involves you swinging the controller around like a racquet. This – we are told – will make us all fitter, and it is a response to the accusations that games are making us lazy. It seems to be popular, too. But it is not going to mean the death of the armchair sports simulation, for sure.
Power Ups – The Video Game’s Own Reward System
When you have a command and mastery of a video game, it is possible to play from the beginning to the end of the game without your character “dying”. Of course, there is a learning curve involved with playing video games and, while you are trying to get to grips with a game there is every chance that you will “die” with frustrating regularity. This is why many of the traditional video games give a character three lives to start with and offer more as the game goes on (if you play particularly well, it may be a lot more). They are a lot like an incentive system for video games.
The “power up” is something which does not feature in some of the more modern-day games, in which a character doesn’t so much “die” as have their efforts brought to a halt at a certain point and have to restart from the last obstacle they cleared. This allows players with perseverance but no great amount of skill to advance further in the game than ordinarily they might. However, in the older games, “power ups” include an extra life; greater speed or strength; invincibility; invisibility (to the other characters in the game); and more of the game’s “currency” – in some games, you pick up coins and in others it may be something else.
While completing a video game is quite enough of a target in itself, the inclusion of these power-ups helps to buttress a player’s resolve to get as far into the game as possible – a series of mini-tests before the big one at the end.
