On Games

I'm one of those socially inept, weak looking outcasts called "Game Geeks" by numptys and Daily Mail readers. Apparently because I'd rather sit inside and enjoy a fascinating videogame experience than go outside and slowly bake myself in the sun, opening up my pores to the possibility of skin cancer, I'm sad and lonely.

Wrong, obv.

The thing with videogames and gaming is that it's Today's Scapegoat. It's the thing that can be used to blame society's ills away. Again, wrong, obv. It's Television, it's Rock'and'Roll music, it's Dirty Dancing. It's still a relatively new form of expression, but one that's advancing and evolving much faster than its nearest audio-visual neighbour - cinema - because there is far more technology in place in the here-and-now than there was at the beginning of the last century.

Of course, that doesn't sell tabloids. Admittedly, videogames don't sell tabloids at any point, because they're still not that important, but there's plenty of scope for shitrags like The Sun or (spit) The Mirror to have a Page 5 story about GTA3 glamourising violence against women, or that Super Monkey Ball is glamourising monkey abuse, or that Mario Sunshine is glamourising plumbers fucking off on holiday...

Videogaming is probably going to be the most lucrative and most creative arm of all entertainment industries this century. The possibilites are endless. At the moment we're stuck in front of televisions or monitors, but what about playing games in Motion Capture suits? What about when the convergence between cinema and gaming finally happens, and we get truly interactive movies?

The current level of scapegoat-ism only comes about because the naysayers and tabloid editors are exploiting the general ignorance about gaming amongst the majority of the public. When that ignorance becomes education, when my generation, when my childrens generation are the ones doing the writing, then there will be another scapegoat, something else to blame our problems on.

Becuse we wouldn't have it any other way.