April 10th, 2009, 6 Comments »
Yesterday I was in Toronto and a dude in a suit and tie rolled by me on a long board. It got me thinking about how often I see men over the age of 25 riding a skateboard. I sometimes see them riding around with their young children, which is kind of charming.
That got me thinking about video games. I remember being kind of shocked to learn, a few years ago, that the average age of a gamer is now 33 years old. That is, that a significant majority of gamers has achieved the age of majority. Having grown up with video games, that shouldn’t surprise me (I still play them), but it does. I guess I always associated games with toys and play, and those were things that adults didn’t typically do.
Are there other ‘childish things’ that our generation exported into adulthood? Also, when I was young, video games and skateboards were mostly boy things. Are there analogous examples from the girls of the seventies and eighties?
6 Comments »
September 26th, 2007, 9 Comments »
I may get pilloried for this, but I’m pretty apathetic about the Halo games. I’ve played and enjoyed a lot of first-person shooters over the years, and I’ve never really seen what makes these games particularly remarkable.
Admittedly, I probably only played Halo: Combat Evolved a year or so after it came out, so other games may have already caught up in innovation. And I only played it on the PC–I don’t know if the XBox version was far superior.
I’ve read articles that sing the praises of its storyline, but I guess that wasn’t particularly compelling for me. The storytelling didn’t strike me as superior to, say, Max Payne or Halflife. Maybe I missed something? It’s a decent game–I just haven’t figured out why people are lining up to buy it.
What do you think sets the Halo games apart from the rest of the genre?
On an unrelated note, that Canada.com article I referenced is under a ‘Games News & Reviews’ banner, but lives in their absurd ‘Share It’ section. I complained about this when they re-launched last year. What rational media organization would put obituaries, e-cards and gaming news in the same category?
UPDATE: Clive Thompson writes about why he likes Halo 3 so much:
Which is Halo’s true gift to the world of games. It did so many things right that designers have been cribbing from it for years. Including, thankfully, the guys who made Halo 3.
9 Comments »
July 24th, 2007, 2 Comments »
It’s a busy day, so here are two ways to entertain yourself (just in case you needed two more ways):
My original title for this entry was “Playing with Balls and Milk”, but that sounded horribly wrong.
2 Comments »
