The Average Gamer

“The Princess is in another castle!”

If you recognize that line (don’t you dare google it), then welcome to the exclusive, super-secret world of video gamers! Membership is selective and offers a lifetime of good times.

A lifetime!

That’s a lot of time. But wait! Why dedicate your life to videogames? Well, everyone else is doing it. Over 50% of American households enjoy some kind of console, ranging from the family friendly Wii to the hard brick of Xbox. You might be thinking to yourself “Wow, that’s over half of the population!”

Yeah, it is, you smart cookie.*

Credit: Entertainment Software Association

Video games are popular, not just in the U.S, but around the world.  This is due partly to their success as entertainment, but like television, music, and books, video games, too, have a higher calling. They reflect the life and culture around us and make some serious social commentaries about the world we live in.

Games take actuality’s afflictions and shove them in your face, force you to play through them, to realize and grow with them. Video games are about us, about humans, the human condition, and the perils we may face. They place you in the center of the action—your own backyard.

While video games might have been for 12 year olds once upon a time, they have been elevated in terms of respect and opinion. I believe this day and age is a huge turning point for the role video games play in our society. They are becoming less and less a young boy’s toy or an unemployed 40 year old man’s only escape from his mother's basement and more of an interaction between us and our inner thoughts.

Video games offer a type of personal intimacy that no film or music can. Playing a video game, more often than not, requires your full attention and interaction. There’s not much else you can do while that control is in your hand. The whole world is at your fingertips, and you must save it.

It is because of this intimacy that young and old alike are plunged into a constant fight against the plights of humanity. We engage in what is not an alternate reality, but another lens to view our surroundings with instead. There are many reasons why we play video games, stemming from the urge for entertainment to the desire for superhuman abilities, but behind the cartoon characters and the imaginative fiction lies a truth.

And that is what we hope to discover.

Join me as we examine video games from some new angles…and some old ones too.


*Cookies aren't smart, but I'm bad at math.

Posted in: players,reality,statistics,video games,why play