I just read a long, but incredibly interesting and well-thought out blog or article or something. It was about video games, and what the world might be like when the gamer generations run things.
The site was http://infovore.org/talks/if-gamers-ran-the-world/ and it made me remark as to something I had written not entirely long ago. When two people who have never spoken write about many of the same things, it is quite possibly coincidence. When millions upon millions talk about it, write about it, think about it, chances are something big is happening. We have a future in entertainment unlike anything in 30,000 years of human history. It is, however, vastly more than that. As I said in my writing several weeks ago, video games are changing us, likely more than any form of entertainment has since written language. Movies, television, cell phones and such may have changed how we communicate, sure, it has globalized us. Video games have changed our very way of thought.
You see, most people who are not gamers do not understand what video games mean to us. They see games as little more, save for the cases of addiction, than tabletop games, or perhaps virtual sports. While that is, perhaps, true in the most basic sense of video games, nobody playing football or scrabble is going to make spreadsheets, read strategies and theories, statistics and debates about them, unless that person does it professionally. Gamers, on the other hand, will. Some of us will start a guild a grouping of dozens or hundreds of people. Some of us will come up with combat strategies. Some of us will try to find every single secret in a game, or max out every single statistic on every single character. In many games, how you progress is permanent, so we make plans on how to be most effecient.
For instance, when you have killed enough enemies in Tactis Ogre, you will gain a level up. You start at level one, and are able to progress to fifty. Every level you gain, you statistics increase, giving you more life, damage to the enemy, or ability to move faster, enabling you to attack an enemy before they can attack you. The issue comes in the fact that there are over twent different classes your characters can become, taking on different roles. Some will heal, some will cast magic, some will attack from afar, some will be right up in the enemy lines. Depending on the class of the character when they level, the characters statistics will increase in line with what they are best suited for. An archer will gain more agility and dexterity, which increases their speed and damage, while a wizard will gain more intellect and magic points, allowing them to cast more, and stronger, spells.
Where this gets muddy is making the most well-rounded characters for your force. All people play differently, and this allows for those differences in personality and play style to come into effect. Where I could make an entire troop of heavy, slow melee fighters, my friend may care to go with archers and healers. It is possible to win with any kind of character, but how to go about that win differs from person to person.
That may all sound like a bit much, but in reality it is what adults do nearly everyday. Make choices now that will affect the future. This is giving gamers more and more the ability to see the consequences of their actions systematically, understanding the outcomes. Or, at the very least, trying to find what effects might come from the cause of the persons choice.
