Why do you like video games?

This works to an extent, but really I'd prefer gameplay over story. Look way back to Mario: The story literally wasn't anything more than "go and save the princess" but it has survived for decades on its iconic platforming. A story can make a game or turn a good one into a timeless one, but it's got to stand on its own also.

 

Video games distract me from the things that suck in real life, take me to a different universe, can allow me to not be human for a little while so I can insult the human race with impunity, and allows me to (at least in the game world) look the way I want to and be the person I want to be. Plus it helps me to get out my evil side. My characters tend to be horrible people lol. Oh, and the stories entertain me. I'm a writer, so I always like a good story.

 

Because they take me away from reality and feed my imaginative mind with fantastical places and situations that I could never find myself in. And probably would never want to find myself in, lol. But ultimately, they are an escape. They also challenge my intellect for the most part and keep my mind busy and active. They are responsible for at least half of the inspiration it takes for me to write. I owe a lot to gaming.

 

I like that I can become another person for a little while, see things from other perspectives. I don't like the challenges that much though, so I usually just run around doing nothing... I don't really think video games are made for that :icon_lol:

 

To have fun and sometimes escape reality

 

When the day has been long and the problems have been many a video game is a train ticket away from it all, that soothes and lets me let the weigh of the day slip away by playing as the hero that defeats evil and sets the world right, a journey that gives an otherwise absent thrill and joy.

 

I remember as a child, being enthralled with the graphic and programming ends of gaming, especially in Spyro (which was my introduction). I wondered how the developers pulled off the portal effects, and my first thought was render-to-texture, but the hardware at the time wasn't strong enough for that, and after finding out about ray casting and meshes vs textures, I began to search more and more about programming. I learned all kinds of stuff in small pieces when teaching myself the basics of graphics programming. I'm enthralled with the more technological and design end of gaming, and it's originally why I went into a Computer Science major (for game development), but now I care to channel my energy into something more productive, like bioinformatics.

I also like video games for reasons already mentioned. They provide a nice escape from life.

 

This UK ad for the first PlayStation made a good case for playing video games.

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They used ads like this to set their target audience as people older than Nintendo and Sega gamers.

 

For older games, I usually play them for just the raw fun that they have. With the huge limitations that were placed on developers way back when, one of the only things they could rely on to keep people interested was that sense of fun, and fun is something that older games do astonishingly well. With newer games however, I'll often play them if I deem it to be a "higher form of art". (I realize how pretentious that sounds.) But games like Shadow of the Colossus or Silent Hill 2 are VERY capable of instilling emotions in players through their gameplay or narratives which I think makes video games as a whole very comparable to film or music as an art form, which is I think something not enough people give video games credit for, probably due to decades of video games being nothing more than a simple pastime. So uh...yeah. That's why I like video games.