Introduction: The Gaming Experience

Have you ever watched a movie, and when it gets to its final moments it reaches the pinnacle of its plot? The climax begins to tingle you inside and you start to experience the same feelings the characters you're watching are going through. Movies for the longest time have portrayed those feelings through visual action. The fight scene, the death scene, the love scene, etc.. have all been used as ways to convey the feelings that affect us in ways unexplainable. Well, video games are falling under the similar category. Implanting ideologies and emotions into controllable characters can change the way we experience those feelings.

Next Generation systems have the power to visually equal reality from fantasy. From the realistic facial expressions to the character movement, video games across the board can replicate what we see with our own eyes. Voice acting changes how we view what's real and what's not, and can even give us the chance to reminisce on some of our favorite past experiences. Ghostbusters: the video game went and got all the characters from the film series to voice over the video game. Such a cast allows for that edge of realism from the perspective of an authentic movie experience rather than a real life one, but can give us equivalent satisfaction.

Whether its first person games giving us an up close and personal experience or third person games giving us a more cinematic feel , Video games are like movies, pulling at the strings of our feelings: happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, elation, confusion, fear, but most of all satisfaction. Some may see video games as a release, or as an addiction. But video games are what we make them out to be. Madden allows us to dive into our inner football fan; giving us control over our favorite players, in our favorite stadiums, with our favorite teams reenacting our fantasies as football fans. Halo, Call of Duty, Fallout, give us a first person view of adventures that the imagination can run away with and allow us to place ourselves in the middle of it all. Whether we're searching for treasure with Nathan Drake in Uncharted, saving a fantasy world with sword and shield in the hands of Link, or playing as some of our favorite heroes (like the upcoming Batman title), video games give us endless alleys of enjoyment to travel down, and a plethora of worlds to take our imagination through.

Video games are what you make of it, and the beauty of it all is that with so many things to chose from, and so many genres that appeal to the masses, there really isn't a wrong choice; only the choice that isn't made.