What I Learnt From a Day Of Playing Video Games

For some reason, video games, Playstation, Xbox, etc… Well, they’ve always had a bad reputation when it comes to finding its place in the child-parent relationship. As a kid, I was lucky enough to have an Xbox, a black box with green details. In all honesty, it didn’t look far off what an alien could dream up. I’d never seen anything like it before!

I was a single person type of player, the multiplayer games weren’t really my style. Naturally, I fell in love with the Need for Speed franchise and it became a huge part of my childhood. I would pretend to plug my brother’s controller into the console and tell him that he was the other cars racing me on the screen. I really do owe the game a huge amount of credit for cultivating my love for cars, in fact, the automotive scene as a whole.

Probably up until the age of 15/16, I would play on and off with my brother and friends that came over, but when the games became more online-focused and complex, I began to lose interest. Playing occasionally but as a whole losing touch with the space, who knows what Call of Duty they’re on now, probably in the year 3000!

Last weekend, I spent a great deal of time playing on my brother’s PlayStation, the very same PlayStation that I tried to convince him for 6 months to not buy. You should have seen the smug look on his face when he caught me playing at 8.00 am in the morning. It was akin to a drug dealer, who had found the perfect user, at least that’s how it looked in the reflection of the screen, I was concentrating on not dying in the game.

I mentioned above the parent-child-console relationship and on reflection, it’s a pretty odd one. Parents buy a console for their children, but over time can become annoyed and threaten to take it away the second it becomes a distraction. Trust me I know from experience, I had mine lobbed out of a 1st story window.

While playing I noticed myself becoming anxious, when my brother walked into the room my instinctive reaction was to hit the power off button, not knowing why I felt the need to do it.

On reflection, it was from childhood when my parents would get cross with me for spending too much time on it. Call it PTSD, or simply anxiousness.

I feel that due to the impression that consoles are a waste of time, an addiction, an excuse to get away from the problems of reality, what these digital reality escapes have been labelled as by a generation of individuals, I have a poor light of them. In fact, I should be celebrating the hyper-realistic gameplay, which allows me to be in the driving seat of the car I had on my wall as a child, swing from the treetops like Spiderman; hunt for treasure like a Tomb raider.

Video games are no different from award-winning movies or tv series, to say they are even more immersive would be true. One does not just lose oneself in the storyline but there is a physical interaction that allows us to live out our wildest fantasies, our childhood memories and reality we have not even begun to conceive.

Video games are digital interactive art forms.

In addition to the cinematic comparisons, games are at the core of what we are beginning to understand is the motivators for our apps and social platforms. You only have to scratch the surface of this domain to realise we are playing games constantly, every second we are on our devices or the internet we are playing a ‘game’, most of us just don’t realise it.

But the real question is.

Is life a game?

Are you a video gamer? Let me know in the comments or drop me a message on any of the following social networks. I would love to hear from you! — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube.