Why games are super rad

I'll be honest - I almost didn't get around to writing this post because I was playing video games.

"It's getting closer and closer to midnight, I should probabl- Oh maaan, that was siiiick!" I thought to myself as I shot a Regenerator at point-blank range and watched its torso explode into a bloody rainbow of fleshy chunks, a satisfied grin plastered across my face. I've been playing a lot of Resident Evil 4 on Gamecube recently, and one thing that's really impressed me so far is how truly terrifying it can be. The dark, hellish aesthetics, deliberately clunky controls and creepy ambient soundtrack all combine to create an incredibly atmospheric and genuinely frightening experience. I'd almost go as far as to say that it's probably one of my favourite games of all time.
My mother does not agree with me. After watching me play it for ten minutes, she remarked that I must have something seriously wrong with me if I enjoyed that sort of thing, that the protagonist looked 'ambiguously homosexual', and that I should just go and read a book before my potential as a human being was totally exhausted.

The thing is, I don't just play violent video games solely because they're violent; I play them because when their violent and horrific concepts are creative and well-implemented, the resulting experience can be incredibly enjoyable. I believe that, just like novels and films, the quality of a video game is not determined by the type and nature of its content, but rather how the content is fleshed out and presented to the gamer. However, trying to explain this to someone from the previous generation is, more often than not, torturous. Despite refusing to play any of your games because they look 'like neandertal exercises in ego-stroking' (my personal favourite so far), they seem to already know everything about them and how bad they are for you. They talk about how much you used to read when you were young and how tragic it is that you've put down books in favour of mind-rotting electronic stimulation, and how they used to play hoop-stick to pass the time when they were young. Good for them.

Of course, many of these criticisms are understandable. The advent of video games and video game culture is, in the scheme of things, a very recent event, and I can appreciate that they must be quite strange and overwhelming for older generations. It's not hard to imagine how deeply shocking Dead Space must be to people who grew up thinking Catcher in the Rye was risque. However, one thing must be made very clear about video games: just like other forms of narrative media such as film, they simply provide experiences for you to enjoy, but in a very unique, interactive form. I personally believe that it's entirely possible (and perfectly reasonable) to have the same sort of fondness for a video game as you do for a particular film or novel based on the experience it offered. These experiences can involve frantic shooting, atmospheric corridor crawls, a budding romance between two childhood friends or even the destruction of entire cities, worlds and galaxies. They can be touching, moving, educational, horrifying, tragic and incredibly epic, and there's absolutely nothing inherently wrong with them.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have an island of zombies to kill and a president's daughter to rescue.

Elliot A.S.