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It seems to me that the golden days of gaming are long past.
The irony of that is that gaming as an industry has never been doing better. Video games have been making more annually than movies and music put together, and in a year fraught with economic turmoil, gaming revenue has been spared much of the brunt of the storm. The internet has revolutionized gaming to no small degree, connecting people who once probably thought they were the only people in the world who harbored more than a passing affinity for Super Mario. The next generation consoles have likewise taken video games to heights I myself would have never would have thought conceivable even a few years ago.
Perhaps it's because gaming has become more than a hobby to me. The past year has seen me pursuing a career as a gaming journalist, and with that experience has come a world view that includes gaming as much in the work folder of my life as in the fun folder. That tends to dampen things a bit, no matter cool it is to get paid (albeit, not much at the moment) to play a video game. Or perhaps it's a just a post-adolescent crisis. I have one semester left in college and then it's on to the real world. I'm suddenly finding myself realizing for the first time just how much I, and the world that I live in has changed.
I am missing the days when watching my brothers play NES was enough. I remember how, back then they would plug in a second controller and let me think I was the one conquering Zelda. To be three again, sigh. I take games for granted now, I think, and looking at the world that has been built up around them, I think a lot of other people do too. We no longer have to wait for monthly magazines to come out to learn about the next big thing in gaming, and often enough, that big thing is never too far off. And when it comes out, our eyes can never shift fast enough toward the future. When did this happen? When did I become incapable of playing a single game for months on end? When did a backlog become an accepted part of my life? When did we start determining the value of a game based on how many “A's” rewarded to it by some over-hyped reviewer? When did it all become so arbitrary?
It's not all bad news of course. Video games are still easily my favorite past time, and the more I become involved in them, the more I find myself loving them. I think I'm just realizing that I'm truly not a kid anymore. Mario isn't enough for me, and those classics that defined me are no more now than just classics. The golden days of gaming are past, gone, and thoroughly quaint. That doesn't mean there aren't still good days ahead of us though, it just means that gaming has grown up, and embraced the best and worst of the grown up world as we all must do. It has embraced seriousness and maturity. It has embraced foolishness and controversy. It has embraced money and greed, though perhaps they were always there to begin with. It has embraced the bad and the good, and like most adult things is now firmly walking in gray.
Few of the best things are ever black and white.
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