Videogames, love ‘em, or hate ‘em. They’re still a thing and are going to be for a very long time. There’s some misinformation, or misinterpretations of this over the past 30 or so years. Some of the fundamental questions that we need to ask ourselves are these 3 things…

1. Are videogames a form of art?
2. What do you learn?
3. Why do we attach stigmas to them?

As an Art:

Let’s just take a look at what I mean. I like to think of video games as an art form, because if we look at the definition of art as being…

“The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”

If books are a form of art, and movies are then video games would clearly be classified as art. If you look at everything at face value, if you read a book, then all you’re doing is reading words and hallucinating. While with video games, you’re making decisions and choices and listening to a narrative. Art can also be a form of learning, and as such we should take advantage of this medium. Maybe that’s a little biased, but visual forms of media are more impactful. If you see someone be gruesomely murdered, versus reading it leaves a different impact on the person. I’m not saying that they’re not disturbing, but affect differently from each other.

Most of the time, I can’t stand to pick up a book and read it. It just bores to me to enth degree and beyond. While if something is more visualised, with more context to it and I can have a role in the interaction of it, then maybe I’ll start to care.

Video games today usually use a branching narrative path. Some have it so every little decision you make or anything you say can affect the outcome of the story. With each decision, it can decide the fate of a person or thing in the story. While a book on the other hand is set in stone. What happens from the beginning to the end is all predetermined, and you just follow that path and not actually experience it fully. The writers for video game companies come up with these ideas, are usually authors themselves. Except they get to help in the part of creating their idea and make it come to life, other than just another word on the page.

What It Teaches:

Not only does it teach the idea of good storytelling, but it also teaches cooperation and new ideas. In some games, there is an objective of some sort, and you and your friends must complete it, or fail in doing so. With this, it teaches you to work together and help one-another. If this fails, you always have the chance of trying again. And you can go at it from a different approach than last time, and not have resource constraints like in real life. It forces you to strategize and take a different approach to the situation. If the odds are against you in a certain situation, then you have to found out how to plan your course of action in order to achieve the best possible results.

I really think others and myself, are getting to the point where reading a book is so unstimulating that it becomes meaningless. I never learned to write well from reading books, but rather listening to dialogue between people or a movie, or video game. If you’re able to translate that in the way some are, then you’ve tapped into a new style of writing.

Here’s an example, I’ll call it, “Speaking Grammar.” While I like writing, I’m not a fan of how all the rules are set in place. I’d rather be using, an “‘em” in a sentence instead of “them.” People in real world don’t speak in such an incredibly formal way to make them sound robotic. Now sure, there’s some cases, but generally you don’t be punctual with how you speak. There’s pauses and emphasis on certain words in a sentence, where it’s very hard to show or represent while still maintaining the sense of some professionalism when you write. If actors or voice actors in a game are speaking in such a way, but are able to tell a story through the use of speaking grammar, then it turns into an entirely different typing dialect, to some degree.

In Modern Culture:

I’m just going to address the elephant in the room, the stigma attached to video games. Some play them and some don’t, or some people don’t even know how to turn onto a computer. (No offense to anyone’s parents.) I feel that there is a bit of a misunderstanding or disconnect of how video games or other modern culture forms are represented in media. Especially Fox news, considering their average age demographic is 72 years old. One of our other staff writers made a point that picking on Fox News, “Is like stealing candy from a baby.” So, they’ll probably not be the main focus.

Some people seem to think only kids play games, I’ll be the first one to tell you that claim is false. A study by the ESA (Entertainment Software Association) showed that most gamers are of the age of 31 years old, and typically male. So I mean, if people are that old are playing games, why do people frown upon it. I actually have the answer to this, back during the 70’s and 80’s. Most people bought video games for their kids as gifts or ways of entertainment. Because this generation of people grew up from playing games when they were younger, they’ve still carried that with them their entire lives. Which clearly shows why the age is higher.

The increasing amount of misrepresenting and information from falsified studies in on the increase. I don’t care what the APA (American Psychological Association) has to say, clearly they don’t understand it and they’ve made a bold claim linking violence to video games in recent years. Statistically with an increase in violence in video games means a decrease in youth or teen violence in the world. In fact, it actually shows that it decreases overall crime rate and helps people transgress anger in a somewhat positive way. Even the U.S Supreme Court came to the decision that they don’t cause antisocial or aggressive behavior in mentally healthy kids.

The problem occurs when you have a mentally unstable person who is either disturbed or unstable, and not able to distinguish reality in an induced psychosis, playing these things and having them go out and go shoot up a school or office building. It’s not the video games fault, it’s because we don’t properly treat people who are mentally ill. Even in the articles in the past, I’ve wrote, I have always hammered the point of people not being treated correctly that leads to this. In reality, it’s just easier to throw up a “clickbait” title or headline and make money off it.