I’ve been playing a lot of video games for work (I can’t say exactly what, but I should be able to pretty soon), so in addition to being late to the party on Journey, I’m also late to the party on God of War (I know. I know.).
These games couldn’t be more different, but I loved them both for their own, very different reasons. Journey felt like a meditation, and I found myself actually feeling pretty emotional toward the end of it. It’s so beautiful, I’m going to play it again when I have time.
God of War is so intense, and so fast-paced, it’s not something I could play to relax or unwind the way I could with Journey, but holy crap is it fun to level up skills and beat up on the bad guys! In fact, I had so much fun playing it last night, I completely lost track of time and it was 4am when I finally realized that I should probably go to sleep.
And my thumb hurts in that video game controller pad way that I haven’t experienced since the old Sega Genesis days and their attendant marathon sessions of NHL 94.
Just a quick thing to think about and consider, because if this hasn’t occurred to me in a long time, maybe it hasn’t occurred to some of you who are reading this: video games are supposed to be fun and entertaining. Games can certainly be art, and games can and do run the whole range of experiences from simple narrative experiences like Dear Esther to complex experiences like Civilization to challenging team-based experiences like Destiny or WoW. Games can and do entertain us the way a movie or TV shows does, but I don’t think I would have stayed up until 4am watching movies last night.
I’ve said before that games matter, and I continue to believe that (whether they are tabletop or video games). I also continue to believe — and this is the point I am taking a very long time to make — that games are supposed to be fun, entertaining, distractions.
A lot of the oxygen in the world that supports video games has been taken out of the room in the last several months by dickwagons, and I know that I lost interest in spending lots of time playing games, and didn’t even want to identify myself as a gamer.
But when I spent some time actually playing some games, I remembered why I identified myself as a gamer in the first place. That’s something I’d forgotten about, and if you’ve forgotten about it, too, maybe this will inspire you to dust off a controller and dive back in.
