 Rank: Advanced Member
Groups: Moderators, Registered Joined: 13/02/2009(UTC) Posts: 3,094   Location: Probably not here Was thanked: 113 time(s) in 76 post(s)
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Lifelong gamer here, and I reject the notion that being a "toy" is a bad thing. Games are an interactive medium, and as such, the better the interaction, the better the game. Problem is how do you define interaction. MEtal Gear Solid is interactive, it just happens to be interaction that unfolds in an entirely linear story. You play through a section and you are rewarded with another long story cutscene. Super Mario Bros barely has any story, so it's all about the gameplay, all interaction. The reward of playing Mario platformers is that playing Mario platformers is inherently fun.
As for the age thing, I think it's ridiculous that games are somehow off-limits to adults, as though once you hit a certain age you have to stop listening to certain music, or watching certain TV, start wearing a tweed suit and smoking a pipe... That notion suggests that only children need play or fun. I mean, what the hell are single adults supposed to do with their free time and disposable income? I was grew up in the 8 and 16 bit era, my parents played on old home-computers with cassette decks before I was born. Kids nowadays, they think of Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty and what have you, but when I was a kid, it was Mario and Sonic (back when Sonic games were actually competent), and you'd buy these games that were difficult, that you might have to keep replaying the same simple level over and over again - yet that was still fun, and is still fun today. But in those days, games were seen as being for kids simply because of the way they looked. Now the stigma is still there, yet games look like GTA or Bioshock, and people get upset as if suddenly it went from cute furry creatures to childhood-destroying murder simulators. A lot of people don't even realise that all those kids who were playing the old Marios and Zeldas, they've grown up now, and are still playing games. Now it's an assbackward world where 12 year olds wouldn't be seen playing Mario because it's "for babies", and will instead get their parents to buy them GTA4, and despite the obvious age warnings all over the packaging, the parents just don't register that GTA4 is not about a little Italian plumber stomping on turtles, but about an immigrant rising up a ladder of criminals through murder, prostitution, drugs, and reckless driving.
So the idea that after 18, the earliest age somebody can legally purchase a GTA game in the UK, people should stop playing videogames, that strikes me as a strange conservative traditionalism where men should join the big company in town with his white shirt and brown shoes and the women should stay bake pies in their floral dresses. |
