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

Videogames are infinitely more than just interactive-audio-visual trips and they have more than proved themselves as an equally capable medium with much meaning and impact as all the rest of the entertainment mediums out there. But there’s also another side to videogames that gets rarely highlighted and as gamers, we’ve somewhat grown to almost gloss over it completely. Yes we’re talking about the darker aspect of videogames, the part about it’s gratifying and unnecessarily-excessive mechanics of violence and over-indulgence in all kinds of moral deviations. Videogames, from the sole viewpoint of the player, are psychological experiences. Simply because in a videogame, we play with our minds . And even though they are interactive in nature and have a complex inner structure, but what videogames ultimately affect us on, is on a purely mental level, and from there, they also leave a deep footprint that stays with us long after we’re out of it. So yes, videogame