Gaming? Dude grow up!

Man, shut up! gaming is awesome!

Well, here I am sitting at my desk quite annoyed because of how often I heard the headline of this post in my life. It’s still in the common mind, the impression of children not wanting to do homework or going to sleep because they want to keep playing on their console. I mean, obviously this still exists nowadays. There are these games mainly made for children or teens, but there is so much more!
If people explored the world of gaming a little bit more without the stigma in their heads this art form would be a lot more accepted in no time. And yeah I wrote art form! I mean gaming is not only “Super Mario” or geeky fantasy with dragons and elfs and shit (I love it, tho). Let’s compare it with movies – which are well accepted everywhere by the way.
There are “arthouse” games that provide a unique experience and/or atmosphere and gives you a lot of things to think about for example “Journey” or “Ori and the blind forest”.
Then, of course, there are the mainstream action “I don’t need a brain for this but it’s fun regardless”-games (yeah I compare them with you “Transformers” films) like “Call of Duty” or “Fortnite”.
Oh, and if you like solving riddles in real life and/or like films where you need to think to understand what’s going on then I have the genre for you: Adventures.
What gets you hooked to a story? Good written characters and your relationships with them. Please play “The last of us” or “Mass Effect 2” then. The stories and characters are better than most of the stuff that gets released in mainstream theaters nowadays.
Also, games can ask highly philosophical questions like “What makes a human a human?” or “Is there good or bad in the world?”. Good examples for that are “Nier: Automata” and the “Deus Ex” games.
Ahh, I almost forgot the huge amount of games where you compete and play against other human beings from all around the world. You have to train constantly to get better and rank up in leagues and shit. What does that remind you of? Hmm, yeah you are right: Sports! I know you what you want to say “Dude, when you do sports it’s actually healthy and good for your body unlike sitting in front of a screen all day” Well, you are right I give you that. However, depending on the game you need an intense amount of focus and hand-eye coordination and whatnot. Playing these games trains your brain in ways nothing else can. And honestly, some people out there shut stop lifting weights and start playing these games to train their dumbass brains imho.

You know I could go on for days here but I don’t want to overwhelm you with my first post. In the future I will probably go deeper into the topic. I hope these few sentences broke a little bit of the ice around the deep in your head lying stigma of video games. I just don’t get why it’s ok to go to the movies and watch any “Transformers” or most of the Marvel movies (just running into a wall head first would be the same thing imo) but when you say you want to play video games the whole evening or weekend you are a weirdo, geek or kid in a grown up body. It’s the same thing, man! However, gaming is often more demanding because you actually do stuff with your hands and brain but I will talk about the very useful skills you can aquire while gaming for years in another post.

To sum things up: Gaming is not only for children, it’s for everyone. There are serious games that challenge you and you brain with difficult topics and/or have challenging gameplay in general. There’s also the opposite, almost no challenge but an amazing experience or atmosphere to just disappear from the real world for a few hours. And if you want to compare your dick size with people around the world you can do that as well.
Let’s not forget the most important thing of them all: Gaming is FUN!

‘Nuff Said, peace!