Saturday, February 05, 2005

Video Game!!!?!?!?!?!?!?

Even after reading and having a new appreciation for video games, they are still a mystery to me. Not to be in a category of their own, video games are among the many aspects of the American culture that I would never claim to be an insider. Joining video games are football, baseball, shopping, and golf. Then there is that endless seating infront of a TV set but that is a totally different club of their own. I have never gone to the boys dorms and missed to see a crowd of two to three boys in a room ardently devoted to the screen fighting what I tend to call the imaginary opponent. Then I have seen my brother just seating there for hours playing all kinds of games. PlayStations, GameCube, Xbox, Game Boy, etc are all Greek to me. It would quite an amount of time and energy to get me "inside"
So to understand where these video games come from, I went on-line to do some more research. My first question of course, is about who produces these video games. Off course this is mass media so, man, I will have to really narrow my search down. First i went to see who are the producers of these games. The first website I visited was www.idsoftware.com. Honestly, i was totally lost. All the names are so strange and non-existent in my world. But the images are so disturbing that I exit from there. So I go to www.blizzard.com. The one Game that is really famous there is Diablo 2. There is an explanation of what the game is all. From what the disctiption says, it looks like another Lord of the rings kinda of story, then I look at the pictures and I have second thoughts looming in my mind. Malorry once said in class that Video games belong to the devil...i can really see how that can be. The cover of the video game is a complimentary of orange or the color of fire, red and black. To be specific, it looks like what some of us would perceive as the pictured of hell with the face of the devil on the front. So I ask myself what are these people inviting me into? I read it more like, welcome to hell. On the strong survive through this perils that are ahead of you. I can almost hear some evil villain laughing..mmaaaahhahhhhaha. So mallory, I do understand that you would think the devil himself was behind the creation of these games. But to these people who are devoted to the art of gaming, they see it differently. They see a challenge that needs to be taken and a journey they need to embark. They get into a world of villains and evil all around, and they become the heroes of some sort.
Still..this understanding doesn't bring me closer to understanding the whole idea of video games.

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