Really, what’s so bad about video games?

My roomate popped in a game called Final Fantasy X the other day much to my delight. It’s not a two player game so only he could play it, but watching him play through the game warmed me over with a sense of nostalgia. I had beaten the game once or twice back in high school and loved every minute of it. The story, what the entire game revolves around, is so incredibly well written that it just sucks you in. You don’t even need to actually be playing it to enjoy it. It’s like someone wrote a great novel and made a movie out of it, only they didn’t leave a single detail out of it to conserve for time (the game takes at least 30 hours to beat). It made me remember something I had all but forgotten until we discussed video games in class the other week.

I, unfortunately, despised books when I was a child. I can’t remember one book that I liked growing up. Now I’m not trying to talk myself up, but I wouldn’t think it arrogant of me to say that I’m slightly more affluent than the average person. How can this happen to someone who doesn’t read books, you say? Easily. Video games were my books. Before video games contained full voice overs (FFX being one of the first back in 2001) everything was written out in text. If you were interested in the story, as I almost always was when playing these long winded games, you had to read along. These games like FFX, these 30-40 hour epics, were my very favorite kinds of games. I contribute my being more than functionally literate to all the reading that I did to play these games. So really ladies (and I say ladies because many of my classmates chimed in to put down the kids who spend too much time on video games, none of them being me or Mike) what’s so wrong about a kid spending long hours in front of a playstation? You think that we’re rotting out our brains, but really, we’re getting a hell of a lot more culture than you realize. Sure, there are badly written video games just as there are badly written books, but you’d be surprised at the amount of depth and character development they put into some of these games. If you really consider this, it’s easy to see why kids spend so much time on them.