The Controversy Angle

It is hard to talk about video games for a long time without mentioning Grand Theft Auto. And it is hard to mention Grand Theft Auto without talking about the controversy about the game, a controversy which is whipped up every time people have difficulty in trying to sell newspapers or attract viewers or listeners to topical talk shows. You know how it goes – the game encourages violence, and it is responsible for lawless youth. It is a completely logical non-sequitur, but it gets people angry and it shifts blame from more deserving targets.

One of the major elements of the criticism aimed at Grand Theft Auto is the idea that in an average playing of the game you get the opportunity to pay a prostitute for sex and when the transaction is complete you beat her to death and take the money back. While it is indeed true that you can do this in some of the games, it is equally true that it is more than likely that people playing the game never even thought of doing so before it was reported far and wide on TV talk shows.

Video games will portray things that should not happen in real life, and it is fair to hold the opinion that this is a shame. However, the same moral standards do not seem to apply to classic works of literature and film-making, or indeed to depictions of real life. In video games, you can indeed do wrong things, but it might be more productive to concentrate on the people who are doing things like this for real, without needing the encouragement of a video game. Click here to read about Evolution of Video Game Soundtracks, Merchandising Marvels, and Mindful Gaming Adventures.

Classic Video Games

Classic video games is a term that in itself is probably enough to set alarm bells ringing in the heads of many people. However, video games have been around for over a generation now, and it is about time that people let it go. Classic films have certainly been made in the last thirty-plus years, and classic novels have been penned too, as have classic albums. Therefore it is fair to say that classic video games do exist, even if the concept upsets a few people. What those games are is another debate entirely.

For many people, the ultimate classic video games are ones which were released very early on when gaming was more simple than it is now. Some people will try to convince you that the old, simpler games are more deserving of the “classic” tag than ones developed ten or twenty years later. They’re just trying to convince themselves, though. Some of the more recent games are undoubtedly genuinely jaw-dropping in their playability and their innovation. If an album recorded in the last five years can be dubbed “an instant classic”, so too can a video game.

Of course, what makes a game deserving of the tag “classic” is another matter. It is probably in the eye of the beholder to a large extent, as playability and enjoyment are subjective things. The consensus seems to settle around the real classics, which gain the title through being constantly surprising, addictive (in a good way) and original.

Virtual Reality – The Games That Got Away

Sometime around the middle of the 1990s, there was a widely held belief that the future of video gaming was the Virtual Reality headset. In the future, we were assured, there would be a lot less watching a screen while playing with a video game controller which made things happen about ten feet from your face. No, you would play games that happened right in front of your eyes, and it would be like you were there. It seemed quite a seductive idea, and it was quite an innovation, but it’s safe to say you don’t know many people who own one.

Virtual Reality headsets are still very much in use, but in a gaming scenario, they never took off. Mostly it had to do with the difficulty of writing a good game for them – all you could do was stand in place, walk around a little and then wait for the headset to catch up with you. They work a lot better in a setting where the surroundings are more fixed and sedate, and they have become quite useful in a scientific application, but for the time being it seems settled that video games will mostly be played on screens.

The idea of being in a more “participatory” game has become more realistic, with gamers enjoying driving games that make use of pedals and steering wheels, golfing games with realistic putting and driving strokes, and other similar ideas. Maybe Virtual Reality will have its day, but the present seems to be far more devoted to other innovations.