An Escape in Games

It’s Christmas Eve guys, and it seems like we couldn’t be any happier.

Why are we here? All of us? Because we love gaming. Because we grew up with it. Because after nearly thirty years of

Mario and Zelda, we’re still the first in line to play the newest games. Because we’ve been the first to realize how truly wonderful gaming is. And sure, people look down at us for depending this much on things that don’t even exist, but we don’t care; we’ve found a marvelous world inside of fiction, inside of everything beautiful that games have to offer.

Gaming is an art form. The masses don’t see it this way, thinking that video games are cheap, meaningless entertainment. And they can be. But for every game like

Battlefield and Call of Duty, for every mindless regurgitation of electronic blood and gore, there are still games keeping the industry alive for what it is. There’s still so much beauty in this growing oasis that people don’t care to see. Perhaps even more so than today’s literature, video games truly are art, and strive to take meaning and power in this world.

Companies like Nintendo and Square Enix try to give us something new, something that’ll stick with us forever. And in a way, that’s one of the most important things in our lives right now. We don’t just need another mindless shooter or another MMO to make us happy. We need things that strive to break the borders of what is possible, games that decide to be revolutionary and don’t give a damn about ultimately making a profit. These works of genius are the reason we got into gaming in the first place.

Gaming is important to us. It gives us a new outlook on life, somewhere to hide during the worst of times. Our own private little club, free of the problems in our lives. Joining in a fandom like this is one of the most important things in the world. Spending hours upon hours discussing these things adds meaning to our lives, and may be even more important than playing the games themselves. And by staying in our fictitious worlds, not giving a crap that they’re not real, we get to stay as children forever, thriving in the wonder and fantasy of it all. The masses look down at the kids who spend years perfecting their games, catching all 151 Pokémon, living in a world apart from their’s. I see children who will forever stay as they are, loving life.

Be it

Harry Potter, Doctor Who, or The Legend of Zelda, we, as humans, need something to fall back on, were life too hard to take on. A guilty pleasure that we can spend hours discussing on forums and message boards more seriously than we take real life. We’ve all faced disappointment, devastation, depression, and we’ll face them more before our lives are done.

We all know that life isn’t perfect. That life is bitch, a schoolyard bully who would love to strip away everything we care for. And in a world so full of constant reminders that things end, that people die, that nothing lasts forever, I know that there will never come a time that I can’t go back and jump into the world of

Majora’s Mask or Super Mario Sunshine. And even if a day ever comes that we learn that there will be no more Nintendo, that there will never be any more Mario or Zelda, that doesn’t stop us from going back and making new memories with the games we already love.