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When I was young, my mother warned me of many things. She told me that eating raw eggs would give me salmonella poisoning and swallowing gum would cause gum trees to grow in my stomach; but she surprisingly never told me that playing too many video games would make me fat or lazy.

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In fact, when I received my very first gray brick of a Gameboy, my mother and I often had regular nightly battles of Tetris and Dr. Mario together. In fact, one of the highlights of my youth was visiting the local arcade with family and playing the entire afternoon away. Video games for my parents, who didn’t have much in the way of financial resources, meant a cheap afternoon of entertainment for the kids. The parents of many of my friends were more concerned that video games would be too distracting from their studies and, it seems, less troubled that Donkey Kong would lead to inactivity, A.D.D or obesity

Twenty years later, the gaming industry has become a $10 billion enterprise, rivaling the film industry as the most profitable entertainment industry in the world. The seventh generation of console gaming has taken the world by storm and the ongoing battle between Microsoft Xbox, Sony Playstation and Nintendo’s Wii-volution has caught just about everyone’s attention. Casual gamers have become an instrumental part of the gaming market share, as uber-hyped games like Guitar Hero have strummed their way into popular culture, compelling otherwise sedentary folk to stand up and rock out.

People the world over can connect and play by signing into Xbox Live or PSN, taking a night of entertainment to a whole new level. Linking up with your friends in a virtual world is as easy as turning on the console and slipping on a wireless headset. Even current generation handheld consoles like the PSP and Nintendo DS allow players to hook up over a small network to chat or duel on downloadable content with nearby combatants. LAN or network gaming has become an international sport, with the televised Major League of Gaming (MLG) featuring hundreds of people battling through Halo and other FPS games to win million dollar cash prizes and lucrative sponsorships.

Members of Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG) belong to one of the globe’s largest online gaming communities. For merely a few dollars a month, accountants, retirees, teachers, students, stay-at-home moms and just about anyone from all walks of life can band together to save worlds or create powerful alliances. The World of Warcraft is the MMORPG’s largest community, with eleven million people worldwide, myself included, partaking in the epic battles of Azeroth. Online games are so popular and addictive that numerous documentaries like Second Skin and psychological studies like the famous Daedalus Project have sought to explore and chronicle the explosion of gaming cyber culture.

So what’s become of the old notion that video games promote inactivity and seclusion? Recent trends in gaming culture suggest interactivity rather than inactivity, togetherness instead of dividedness. In an age where people feel increasingly more isolated, the world of gaming brings people together one controller at a time. {w}

profiling: volume i, issue ii

 

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