Video Games

 I’m too old to play video games.  Or so some people say.  And FPS games are too violent, are somehow culpable in mass shootings and other senseless acts of violence and should be banned, because hey, thinking is too hard and citing nonsensical metrics to try and validate one’s ignorance is much easier than providing actual real-world data to support one’s statement.  Do mass shooters play violent video games?  Some undoubtedly do.  But that’s not to say that there’s a correlation between the two.  And engaging in one certainly does not invariably lead to the other.  You might be a regular kingpin on the player stats screen of your favorite multiplayer game, but that certainly wouldn’t make you Rambo in real-life.  You’d go down faster than a destitute sex worker.  In fact, you’d more than likely drop like a bag of shit in a real battle if you tried going Counter-Strike on the enemy’s ass.  There have been half-baked hip-hop albums that would have dropped faster than you.

 And no, you’re never too old to play video games, unless of course, you’ve since died of old age.  Well, maybe certain video games.  Like anything related to My Little Pony or Dora the Explorer.  Indeed, more video games these days come with an R18 rating slapped to the front of them – you can even be locked up in certain countries for letting little Johnny tear gangsters a new one in Cyberpunk 2077 or ripping out a Cacodemon’s eyeball in one of the more recent (and most excellent) DOOM installations.  But people still break the law and buy little Johnny these games, because hey, responsible parenting is just as difficult for some as it is for others to get their facts right.  Not that it really matters, though.  Most kids won’t be affected one iota – I’ve been playing DOOM and Wolfenstein since they were the new kids on the block, and I’m just as screwed in the head as I was before they were even the proverbial twinkle in the developer’s eyes.

Putting aside non-issues of moral panic and the like, gaming is expensive, not only from a consumer perspective, but a development one as well.  AAA games are too obsessed with style over substance – graphics over gameplay, which pushes up hardware demands, meaning more expensive consoles and PCs for gamers and an ever-increasing demand for more money in order to make the games.  I’m all for pretty graphics – indeed, I love eye candy, but gameplay is ultimately king, and frankly, I don’t want to have to fork out for a new console or graphics card just so I can determine the religious affiliation of virtual insects.  It’s a nice-to-have, but as the smorgasbord of retro-inspired ‘boomer shooters’ has taught us anything, is that you can make a visually attractive game without you having to invest in your own power pole.

In fact, retro shooters are what really should be putting a tinkle in your gaming winkle.  Granted, there’s an awful lot of borderline shovelware titles in every online gaming marketplace, but there has been a plethora of various pearlers which rival or even surpass the multi-million dollar AA and AAA titles in terms of quality gameplay, proving that many gamers couldn’t give a fat rat’s posterior gastrointestinal orifice about photorealism, because the retro visual styles of these throwbacks look great in their own right, and furthermore, further the argument that video games can indeed be considered works of art in the same light as film or music.  Some of them even use 30-year-old game engines for that extra old-school appeal.  And the biggest thing about it all is that you won’t require an industrial-grade refrigeration unit just to play the first five minutes of the game.  Remember, consoles and gaming PCs are expensive, there is a cost-of-living crisis going on worldwide, and like Simply Red once sang, money is too tight to mention at the moment.

And most modern AAA games are so detailed and so complicated that it is impractical for the average nerd to get hold of the SDK and make their own mods without having gone to media design school first.  This wasn’t the case in the beginning with the likes of DOOM, Quake and Duke Nukem 3D, all of which either came with a level editor, or one was made available to download.  Indeed, the ability to mod games is what makes these glorious boomer shooters possible, and to this day, people are still making mods for these older games.  Just look at the game Selaco – it uses a heavily modified version of the original DOOM engine, and it was made by people who like yours truly were sufficiently geeky enough to open up the associated editing utilities and have a go.  And the quality of these mods has skyrocketed in the last decade.  To begin with, most user levels were only playable by ten-year-olds, since only a ten-year-old could find a level that consists of one room with thousands of monsters to be remotely entertaining.  But now they rival professionally made games in terms of aesthetic and gameplay value.  Some of them are even launching careers in game development, creating jobs in the process, which is good for the economy, and contrary to the nonsensical invective spouted by do-gooder wowsers and professional sticks-in-the-mud types, good for society overall.  It’s ironic that anti-gaming crusaders want to ban video games and make them illegal on account of their violent content, since the law is (ironically) upheld with the potential threat of state-enforced violence.  Get caught with a banned video game?  Get arrested.  Refuse arrest because you morally object to laws which create victimless crimes?  Get clobbered with batons and nightsticks, sent to the worst prison in the country and cop it up the botty from your sex-deprived cellmate who is built like a skyscraper and who hasn’t had it since he killed his last cellmate back in 2006.  See the irony?  The puritans and wowsers certainly don’t!