01/02/2011

[TOTW] Gamers, the past, the middle, and something weird of a future?

When we play a game, do we sometimes stop to think about how game evolved and where us gamers are heading? 

Of course not! We play because we love the way we feel omnipotent (or not), against all odds, and all adversities, i mean wouldn't you like to be for example Nathan Drake, climbing places and getting the hottest of women, and weirdly falling, crashing, getting beaten up, shot up, being in an train accident and escape WHILE suffering from a shot wound in the middle of a snowy mountain!? But enough of that, we are talking about gamers here, and how it was before and now.




Before I and maybe even you, you old dinosaur, were even born the game industry was taking its first steps, small ones, from its core design, missile defense systems to the what we now know as arcade, console, personal computer and later hand held games.

The Legend Began way back in the 80's (or was it 90's??)


I for one remember my father playing Prince of Persia for the old Amiga and later Spectrum ZX, i mean it was my first contact with gaming and I remember it exactly even to the part that i was scared to hell when he jumped on through the big gaping holes not to come falling down and inevitably make some new holes in his fashionable wardrobes. After sometime later, i started playing it, and it felt amazing, i would think of new ways to meet that 60 minute timer that almost seem impossible to beat, and those controls were awesome for the time. After sometime i started to expand my gaming knowledge, passing through Ace of Aces (for the Atari) and Titus the Fox (PC) and I remember a very fun part of it, being a lot of fun. My imagination spurred thinking I was a pilot of a place, destroying those brick-like trains and destroying the most weird shaped planes, the graphics were horrible in a modern view-point but at the time it was the s***! So why was it such awesome, because we used mainly our imagination for what was missing, something that nowadays is replaced with shiny new graphics. 

Spectrum ZX, marked a new way to play games and work.

Time went on and on, I got a Mega Drive (Blast Processing ftw!), and the graphics were better, and , , at school it was an insane meeting for tactics, imaginations and magazines readings of out of the world news from both corners of the gaming world. It was awesome, it was almost like a brotherhood of gaming, sure most of us were geeky, nerdy, but we talked and talked, made a lot of alliances and started playing in each others house, trying to get those hard to get places, there was communication.



When the "webz" started to take over the information and the games, the less and less I talked to anyone about gaming, it was almost like a dirty little secret I kept, i started to get this underground and the more times evolved the worse it gets, me and you (YES YOU!), started taking up nicknames and started to take alternate personalities, and most of the gaming community shifted to tons of places, directions and stereotypes. 


In the modern times, we find ourselves with a lot of social networks, and nifty console/pc add-ons that let you say what you do in game for example trophy, achievements or other thing we love to get even though we don't admit it, and even more we are surrounded by virtual people who we don't know, sometimes good influences, sometimes bad and sometimes completely ... wrong. So why this change? why do we allow ourselves to sometimes hide a dirty little secret that sometimes scare people? Why does little 10 year old keep killing me and taunting my character while i play? And where are we, gamers, heading?

"Why does little 10 year old's keep killing me and taunting my character while i play?"


Leave us a comment about how you think gamers mentality, way of interacting or even socializing is heading! 

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