A Viewpoint

This second and final part of The Dark Side of Videogames will focus on a personal experience on how videogames condition our psyches towards violence. Back in 2005 (or maybe 2006), when F.E.A.R came out, it quickly became one of my go-to videogame experiences, I was hooked from the onset----the gritty, realistic graphics (by the standards of it’s time), the visceral gameplay that seamlessly blended both surreal first person shooting mechanics and close combat martial arts thrills perfectly, and on top of all that, it’s horror infused story that had you trying to bring down a threat that you have absolutely no idea how to. Needless to say, it was one of the most promising videogame experiences and totally lived up to it’s premises and more. And even to this day, in the ‘lists’ of most memorable FPS’ of the past decades, you’ll most likely find F.E.A.R popping up in them. Anyway, there was a certain level in the game which gave you a pretty unique kind of weapon—instead

The MCU is now officially the biggest movie franchise of all time and they’ve completely earned every bit of their supermassive success. The greatest thing the Marvel films did lies not in their sheer cinematic spectacles but in their delicate balancing act which focused on it’s characters’ super-heroism as well as their human vulnerabilities, simultaneously humanizing these super heroes on a level that’s both relatable and heartfelt for us. This is the real key to their success—they made those fictional characters feel real and brought them closer to the audience with their individual emotional journeys, character arcs and resolutions. It’s what makes the MCU both universal and intimate, at the same time. To make us feel for it’s characters so deeply is the real success of these films and that’s what’s responsible for bringing back the audiences into the theaters for multiple viewings. However, when viewed from a purely cinematic standpoint, it’s also not hard to see that