I have always enjoyed playing video games. One thing that I have noticed, however, is that there are large groups of people who see video games as a waste of time, some even going so far as to say that it will numb your brain. I would like to disagree. As someone who has played lots of video games, I can tell you that both of those are huge misconceptions, and actually games have a had a very positive impact on my life.
I first got really into video games in 8th grade when, after bugging my parents about it for months, I got an Xbox 360 for Christmas.
I originally wanted it because it was the console that most of my friends from school had, and since I lived way outside of town I thought that it would help me have more time with my friends who lived so far away, and might even help me make new friends too.
It did just that. Playing these games with my friends, we forged a sort of camaraderie through our sense of accomplishment when succeeding in multiplayer games together. In the online forms of those multiplayer games, we also met many interesting people from around the country, some of which did indeed became new friends of mine.
Most people would say that games are meant for having fun, and although I do believe that entertainment is the main function of most video games, there are a great many games that I feel have left me with more than just a few basic hours of fun.
One great example for me is the recent release, Life is Strange, an episodic adventure game about a girl with time control powers and her very deep friendship with another girl. There’s a lot more to the game than that, but what I found most important was how real the friendship between the two main characters felt to me. It felt like they would do anything for each other, and in the end I ended up caring about their fate as if I was also part of the story. I was so invested in them being together and safe that I essentially sacrificed a whole town in the game just to save one of them.
This type of immersiveness and connection to a character is one of the best things about many story driven games. Developers are able to make you feel like you are a part of the story and sometimes like it is real. Of course it’s not real, and I recognize that, but the fact that something so unreal can leave such an impact on a person's life is fascinating. Many people feel this same kind of way about movies or TV shows rightfully so because they are both similar to videogames in what they have to offer. Like movies or TV, video games can often be used to tell genuine and fascinating stories but for me the feeling of playing a videogame with a good story is simply better than that of a movie or show because of how you can feel like you are part of the story. This effect usually emerges from the fact that you are the most important person in the story in just about every game and that makes you feel like what happens to you happens to them sometimes happens to you.
After reading this, I hope that if you ever once thought that video games are waste of time that you have reconsidered your position and would be more open to the great things that videogames have to offer. That is not to say that I think everyone needs to play videogames or that everyone should love them; I just want the stereotype of a gamer being some fat guy who lives in his mom's basement and eats only Doritos and drinks Mountain Dew all day to be a thing of the past. Video games can be much more than most people give them credit for, and they can touch the lives of many different kinds of people.
