~first draft~
So here I am, back again for my second attempt at blogging. Let’s hope it’s better than my last.
Do they.. Well, do they? I suppose I’ll start by giving a brief history of my hazy, lazy, brain drain-y gaming ‘career’. I burst onto the gaming scene when I was around 10 years of age (1990) with the Commodore 64. I owned many, many games; all the classics: Green Beret, Double Dragon, Barbarian, Chase HQ.. I mean, the list, spongy memory permitting, is potentially endless. Without heading down a road brightly lit by nostalgia I remember them to be pretty good days on a whole.
I haven’t got any memory of being particularly affected in any way negative or otherwise, probably because it was all some time ago now, regrettably! Anyway, I think my next major gaming platform was a Sega Megadrive with a Nintendo Game Boy in between there somewhere. I don’t remember owning many games for the Megadrive, they were too expensive for a child from a working class background to afford, so whenever I could afford it I used to rent games out from the local corner shop.
Was I angry in this time — not that I can remember — but yes, the N64 and its games had an ability to play with my emotional states in other ways.
Next up was what I see as the pinnacle of my gaming life, never to be bettered; the ere of the N64. The system and its games landed in Earth’s timeline perfectly for true gamers of the day. Everything about it was pure 100% gaming perfection. The controller to this day (slight niggles aside) is my favourite gaming pad of all time. The other kids had Playstations but in my opinion despite having some big and very worthy games, was a system for gamers who found the N64 too difficult to play.
After the N64, bar a couple of handfuls of titles on the GameCube, my gaming hobby was on a steady decline. Thankfully the N64 wasn’t that long ago that I can’t still remember what emotions it evoked and stirred within me. I used to sweat, grind my teeth, competitive matches on F-Zero X even often gave me heart palpitations. I once stayed up all through the night playing Turok with my best friend of the time. Once I did finally close my eyes the now crude looking 3D polygons of a time past were burnt in to the backs of my retinas like a sick eyeball tattoo that proved my hardcore devotion to gaming.
Was I angry in this time — not that I can remember — but yes, the N64 and its games had an ability to play with my emotional states in other ways.
After the GameCube, the next Nintendo home console release was the Wii. As previously mentioned my interested in video computer games was in decline but I just had to get the Wii out of a sense of loyalty to Nintendo, I still had much respect for their creative work which everyone else in the industry measures their own by, and still to this days hasn’t matched or exceeded.
At the time of writing this the Wii is coming to the end of its lifespan with the so called ‘Wii U’ readied on the sidelines to take its place. I played all the AAA titles for Wii, Metroid, the Mario games, etc, and I loved them as works of art, but no where near as much as I would have done a few years previous… I guess sometimes you just grow out of things.
but there was a side effect, at times, I would get very, very angry.
Now with some time on my hands and a lack of any AAA Nintendo titles to play, I though I would give Modern Warfare 3 (MW3) on the Wii a go. Not ever owning an Xbox360 or PS3, these FPS games have by and large pasted me by. I think there are too many of them and I think there is nothing big or cleaver about them. I kicked off with the single player mode. I could only bare the first three or four levels: it was dull, boring, and linear; is this what all the kids are playing these days?
There was no way I could play that dross and what pleasure anyone gets some such poor game mechanics boggles me. I moved onto the online multiplayer. Now, this is different I thought. Online gaming was and still is quite new to me so there was a sense of the exotic about the experience. I soon found myself hooked, reaching out to real people around the globe and battling to see who has the best gaming skill. I found myself joining a ‘clan’, which is just a group of players who all meet up and play against other clans to fight for bragging rights.
I began to get better and better and am now able to give some of the best players in the MW3 Wii’isphere a run for their money, but there was a side effect; at times, I would get very, very angry. What I can say is I feel the anger has nothing to do with the theme of the game, warfare, but more to do with that which online FPS gaming entails. The online factor is the only new introduction into the equation.
With online FPS gaming comes many annoyances which have the ability to get right under your skin. On much too many an occasion, you can find yourself in impossible situations, being shot simultaneously from three different directions, and countless other situations which seem to purposefully taunt you like you are having the absolute worst luck of your life and are powerless to do anything about it. Powerless, because most of the time you are reliant on the other players on your team to work with you for the team, which more often than not, they don’t.
Then there are poor network connections which can see you shoot someone fair and square, only for you to realise their network connection is better than yours and they shot and killed you a split second earlier
Compounding on all the above is the single most annoyance of all.. hackers. Hackers who impose themselves on to others are the absolute scum of the gaming world, and it seems MW3 Wii players are at their mercy. They cheat with infinite ammo hacks, 1-shot-kill pokes and aim-bot mods. They can and often do, alter your profile and statistics — as if cheating their way through a match wasn’t bad enough!
The scary thing is, anger is addictive, and I can’t help but feel that the people who make these games induce that emotion along with other Jedi mind tricks tricks to keep people coming back for more torment. It would also explain why there is now a massive FPS market to cater for. These types of gamers are nothing more than people looking for a fix for their emotional peptide addiction.
So the answer to the question is a big fat yes, video games can make you angry, but not all games.
I know that it would be easy to give into the seemingly harmless addiction and continue playing the game, but I know the wise choice would be to just get rid of it and never look back before the anger and irritability seeps through into other areas of my life any more than it already has.
