Hey Internet. Sorry about the lack of updates. Being a college student STILL IN SCHOOL is quite depressing and harrowing. Busy busy busy this time of year, but fear not! G3TM has not been left by the wayside just yet. Many of our members are, in fact, on break (not me) and will be able to push out regular content again. In the mean time, I offer this interesting bit about gaming.
I’m a member on IGN’s website. Sometimes I poke around and make comments and occasionally make an update here or there that re-posts these articles and whatnot. Aside from being a shameless plug for IGN and their fantastic content, I noticed a really neat thing. As a member on the site, you can “Follow” games, like you would people on Twitter. I had not followed any games up until this point as it seemed quite useless. However, when I actually ventured to follow some particular games that I owned, something peculiar showed up. There were stats that gave a breakdown of my games in several categories including, for the purposes of this editorial, the estimated value of the collection. Intrigued, I assumed that this stat was tracking the full retail price of the games I was following. I had always been curious as to how much money I’ve spent in my time on Earth on videogames. On a boring Saturday night, I had trekked though my memories to remember each and every game I’ve bought and have played to completion or plan to complete to compute how much money I’ve dumped on games. Good God it was a lot.
For a broke college student that has never had a job in his life, the amount of money was staggering: $4,690.76. I could practically pay for a year’s worth of tuition with this money, not to mention the fact that there was $319.90 of MORE games I wanted to buy. Now these are only the games that I’ve finished or plan on finishing, so the figure could be a lot higher if I included the games I’ve bought and never played and even the games I’ve forgotten entirely. Granted, I’ve gotten games on sale and have bought used. Still, over $4,500 dollars on games is a huge shocker. This doesn’t even cover the cost of the game systems that played the damn things either.
For better or worse, I’ve picked a huge money dump to invest in for entertainment. Do I regret a single dollar on any of these purchases? Well, I think games are one of the best forms of entertainment out there. Vicariously living out a world with my character and being an active medium of entertainment is what makes games so powerful. And because gaming is relatively new in terms of its brethren entertainment forms like movies and music, it’s “golden age” has yet to come I feel. Gaming is only going to get better in the future. There’s an unlimited amount of potential. Gaming has yet to have its greatest creators. Movies have a Spielberg. Books have Stephenie Meyer a Shakespeare. Music has a Zeppelin. Games don’t have that genre defining character that has created a golden gaming standard yet (although Shigeru Miyamoto comes close). So to answer, no; I do not ever regret spending a single dollar on games because of what they are and the future of what they can be.
Ok, so maybe I regret buying Jackie Chan Adventures for the GBA…
-Paul Nguyen (Silver Fox 92)
No comments:
Post a Comment