Why do video games matter? Many believe them to be violent terrorist machines that are made to brainwash our youth and are to blame for every shooting that occurs. Others don’t even give video games that much credit, many not aware of their presence or popularity in the world. I don’t know which one I prefer more, hatred or indifference.
At the very least, hatred garners attention and conversation, even if it is a ill informed and misdirected conversation, there is still people caring about video games one way or another. Well this is not for those people for two reasons: one, you, 40 year old bored parent, will never likely play a video game with deep artistic merit, sorry candy crush doesn’t count, and two your beliefs are too embedded in false statistics and illogical connections, that even the most simple and logical arguments against your child murdering people because of a piece of entertainment would likely fall on deaf ears.
No, these words are for you, the people who don’t care about video games, who dismiss it as child’s play and liken it to playing with action figures. These words are for you because I believe that if you only experienced for a moment what a deep beautiful artistic game could give you, you could change your opinion on what games are and can be. 
My partner is not a gamer besides playing his friends N64 during a few brief moments in his child hood. I have been a gamer since I was 5, playing on those cheap handheld devices with a static color background with black pixels moving over it. So to say there is a bit of a divide between our experience with the medium. One night, after being together for a few months, I told him about my passion for gaming and how much gaming has shaped who I am and how moved I have been by certain gaming experiences. He looked at me as if I was crazy and needed to find the nearest exit. He stayed and asked, “But isn’t it just like Mario and stuff?” It was that moment I understood why gaming has been reduced to no more than a child’s past time. I wasn’t that people didn’t care, it was actually that. people are merely unaware and have difficulty learning about it. I was shocked and showed him a trailer for Mass Effect 3 and his reaction was, “Wow, it looks like a movie!” He didn’t even know games like this existed, that they were capable of this kind of emotional fidelity. It was also, when I tried to get him to play a similar game did I understand how hard it was to teach someone of the value of a game like this. “Why not just watch a movie?”
“Could someone please explain this to me? What is the appeal of video games?”
I am finishing my degree in Creative Writing, and while in a Playwriting class and reading a play that had to deal with a character who won a World of Warcraft championship , my intelligent teacher mid-sentence, paused and said, “Could someone please explain this to me? What is the appeal of video games?” As someone who is surrounded by a bunch of people who choose books as their main source of entertainment, right in front of Netflix, my hand shot up. This was my time. She called on me and I first explained the competitive circuit that the character was experiencing and how much money is actually up for grabs in some of them. She was shocked. I then said, “There is people who play for the money yes, but there are also people, like me, who play as a way to interact with art and become fully immersed in a world where I am able to live out thousands of different lives and make choices that directly alter that world.” She was even more perplexed as it seems I had just shattered the same preconception which my boyfriend had held. As a teacher and explorer of knowledge, she investigated further, “Can you give me an example?” I luckily had just finished Episode 4 of the Walking Dead season 2 made by Telltale.
Clementine from Telltale’s Walking Dead Season 2
I explained that I had a choice to make. Everyone, guns drawn, were aiming at each other. The character who I was in control of, a young girl named Clementine saw something no one else did, and in the end I either did nothing and let a infant die or I shoot and save the child, but start a giant shoot out. To make matters worse there was a timer counting down. I explained what physically happened within me when the choice came into my hands: heart pounding in my chest, cold sweat, shifting eyes, genuine stress and fear. I explained to her that I was in that world, I was that little girl and I was making that decision, the fear in her eyes was the same in mine, and that was why I played video games, was to experience visceral and real emotions of another person and another world. Of course others play it as a sport, matches with no real progression, and others play it for their social qualities, but where I feel games can hold up with other mediums is when it comes to artful emotional games that provide a gripping narrative which is mirrored in the game play.
My partner is really into theater. When I ask why, he says it’s because he loves the live element of it. The proximity to the physical presence of emotion and the possibility of human imperfectness being honed and worked on until a show is smooth. When he asks me why I am into video games I say that our reasons are not very different, you like to see a world from a few seats away, I like to be in the world and experience it through the eyes of another. Of course one is not better than the other, they are just different avenues of receiving art into our lives. I think that theater is sometimes a bit too full of it’s self and he thinks that video game characters, even the beautifully rendered ones, come off like cartoon characters. It’s perhaps why there is quite a bit of crossover with book lovers and gamers, both, at times, allow a person to inhabit the consciousness of another.
There is merit where ever art is and I don’t think games should be overlooked because they were once a long time ago only as deep as collect the coins, dots, rings, and don’t get hit by bad guys. While I believe those too have a certain artistic merit, I believe that in order to be taken seriously, Mario and Call of Duty have to stop being the only conversation people unfamiliar with games are having and we, lovers of this medium, need to start talking louder.
Shy Guy Gaymer 