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 […]

Although the present generation are frequently attacked by their “elders” for the way in which they behave, it is fair to say that there is a certain amount of that criticism which goes over the top. Certainly, the way that some people react to video games it would be no exaggeration to say that they consider them to be the devil’s work. Video games – in the home, anyway – are a relatively recent development, and there are people living today who were brought up in a […]

You will hear it said a lot, if you spend much time around gamers or their friends or parents – or indeed if you yourself are a gamer. The word is spat out with real feeling, but the way it is said is almost more mocking than angry, and it seems to cloud the real issue. You must have heard it, either reported, acted, or said for real. “That game, you’re always playing it – I sometimes think you’re addicted!” What might surprise some people is that […]

One of the things that is used as a stick with which to beat the gamer is the idea that gaming is a “fantasy world“. Some people do believe that the player sitting with a controller in his or her hands has reverted to a child like state in which they cannot tell the difference between digitized figures on a screen and real people. And while the best games do have an element of immersion to them, it is completely inaccurate to suggest that gamers have difficulty […]

The rise of sport 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. Once you discovered a way to hoodwink the computer player’s defense, you could rack up as many goals, touchdowns or […]

The popularity of video games has changed in ways more subtle than many of us ever give credit for. Yes, it has become a growth industry due in no small part to the way it has offered people what they want. Cerebral games are now more cerebral, violent games more violent, and games featuring hedgehogs now have all the more hedgehogs in them. However, there is also another difference which has become all the more telling since the 1990s. Early in that decade, to play a really […]

A clever comedian once said that the idea that video games influence human behavior is a ludicrous one, pointing out that if the games we played in the 80s had influenced what we did then, people would have been running around in darkened rooms with flashing lights, swallowing pills as they went. He may have had a point. Certainly, what he said has a point behind it in another way. Specifically, computer games have changed incredibly over the years from the days of PacMan – when they […]