Wikipedia says, “An electronic game involves interaction with an interface to get visual feedback on a video device like a television screen or monitor.”

 

What Is a Video Game?

 

In literal terms, a computer game is even broader than what Wikipedia says. For the foremost part, video games are electronic things with which you interact on a screen. But some games follow game rules and use computer game peripherals but don’t use screens. These makes the definition harder, but they serve to form a vital, more significant point: Video games as a medium became enormously broad over the forty-or-so years since the Atari 2600 was released.

 

Video games nowadays include everything from virtual toys to hyper-cinematic blockbuster action experiences to slow-paced walking simulators. Often, you play with a handheld controller, with button presses translating to onscreen actions. With the increase of touchscreens, a number of those buttons became virtual; others eschewed virtual buttons in favor of swipes and other gestures. There are some games that track your hands in 3D space; others don’t require your hands in the slightest degree.

 

Games can seem like reality, or they will seem like abstract paintings. They’ll tell the original beautiful story you’ve ever seen, or they will be utterly destitute of narrative.

 

At some point, your characters have predefined personalities; they speak. Sometimes they’re silent, blank slates. Maybe you’ll never see their face. Sometimes you’ll be able to spend hours manipulating sliders to affect every single aspect of how a personality looks, so you’ll make one that’s truly your own.

 

There’s a condition called “flow,” and though it had been created before the arrival of video games, it’s a critical piece of why people love games most. If you’ve ever seen someone within the middle of a game session, slack-jawed, wide-eyed, they don’t seem like they’re within the lounge in the slightest degree, just a husk where an individual would be. That’s because their brain isn’t therein room; it’s within the game. They’ve gotten into the flow. This is often the perfect experience, the one creator’s design for and the players hope for. Even the foremost, avid consumers of other media don’t be their little worlds. World of Warcraft utterly engulfs the way players.

 

Video Games as Art

A computer game causes you to be culpable. It forces you to be part of something. It can cause you to do things that you don’t feel comfortable doing, and it can cause you to consider your actions both within its context and the world beyond your TV’s bezels. While many of the heavily violent games that the industry is so derided for may enjoy the carnage, others ask you to think about what you’re doing and what you’ve done. These games has lower budget, made by small teams or maybe single people, and attempt to expose our society in the same way that the other medium might. But yet again, a game presents the experience in a visceral way that’s simply impossible elsewhere. I encourage you to buy a gaming chair from gaming chairs ireland and experience the beauty in gaming world.

 

It’s still relatively rare and amazing that a game takes full advantage of opportunities afforded by interactivity to critique or bring a new perspective to cultural issues. Still, the experiences that do are unlike anything in any medium. These games are rarely “enjoyable,” though sometimes they’ll be mechanically “fun” (or, at least, engaging), which is arguably more significant because it creates a desirable dissonance that games just like the border-security puzzler Papers, please use to excellent effect.

 

These games serve to demonstrate the facility of the medium; a possibility has been widely untapped. Literature and other media/art forms will still surprise us with new stories and make us rethink our worldviews until the inevitable heat death of the universe, the extent of their capabilities is comparatively known and limited. Games, being so young and then incredibly diverse, are ready to do such a lot more to shock us—narratively, structurally, and formally—for many, a few years to return.

To those that don’t play video games, the industry can seem opaque and also the culture uninviting. Still, the medium is flourishing, home to a number of the original brilliant work available anywhere. Video games are essential. They matter.