T3h Games!

So today I entered an Essay contest for the ESRB which asked why I thought game rating summaries were important. That got me thinking about why it is that games are so important:

Games bring us together. During childhood, I bonded with my family over games. My dad and I fought off demons together in Act Raiser, looked for the Seven Mystic Runes of the 7th Saga, even stomped around as Godzilla saving both Tokyo AND Outer Space. How's that for being involved with your kids? Nothing quite like beating up UFOs and King Gidorah AT THE SAME TIME to warm the heart and create memories that last a lifetime. We still talk about games to this day, reminiscing about how we never did stop the Warlock in Shadowgate. Freaking Shadowgate.

Yeah, that sad little "you're out of lives" jingle from Mario Bros. has NOTHING on the grinning specter of Death looming ominously on your TV screen, mocking your inadequacies with his silent rictus, and those soulless, all-consuming, ever baleful eyes.

But I digress. It wasn't just father-son bonding that these games fostered. The advent of the n64, and Goldeneye in particular helped me make friends and influence people. Well, I shot them a bunch with the golden gun anyway. It's a kind of influence.

What really made the game great was that it allowed up to four people to play the game at once, so my friends and I would sit there, joking and trash-talking with each other, while we fought to the death on screen. Unless you were a vile screen-watcher, in which case the fighting spilled over into the meat world, and rightly so.

The best thing about Goldeneye, though, was what its success bore: Perfect Dark.

Easily one of the best games I've ever played, Perfect Dark brought my sister Sierra and I together like nothing else. We could spend hours together, fighting bots, fighting against each other, but never fighting each other. This game provided rocket-powered catharsis, and a competitive story mode I have not seen in any game before or since. Also, it had this guy:

















It's time to admit it, games are how we relate to each other. My group of friends comes together to play role-playing games, which gives us an excuse to socialize with one another. My girlfriend and I play games of Scrabble together on quiet nights. Earlier tonight I played Warhammer 40k with my best friend, and we spent the whole time laughing.

The point of all of this is that games bring us together. Through them, people get involved with one another across barriers both real and imagined. Anyway, that's all I can really think to say for now. But I do believe I'll write more about this subject soon.