Electric Evolution

Video games have been a part of my life for the longest time. Even before I was able to comprehend how to use a controller, I was watching my big brother play gems such as Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Resident Evil, and others. Once it was my turn to try and rescue the kidnapped Princess Toadstool from the misunderstood King Koopa, I felt so immersed in the game, as if it was really me adventuring through the paintings hidden all around the Princesses castle. This may have only been around 15 years ago, but back then technology was definitely not as advanced as it is now. Video games have grown rapidly as a technology and as a business, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Video games are good not only for individuals, but for society as a whole.

Tom Bissell, writer and video game advocate, explains this in his book "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter." In the beginning, he comes up with a false scenario of his children asking him where he was when the United States elected their first black president. He explains how on that day, the postapocalyptic video game Fallout 3 was officially released, but he told himself he only was going to play for an hour and get right back to the election. After playing for seven hours, he writes, "I turned off my Xbox 360, checked in with CNN, and discovered

that the acceptance speech had already been given (351)." Here, Bissell is showing how engulfed he became in the virtual world and how time just flew out the window from the realistic scenes the game was giving off.

A lot of new games that have come out have had a very open-world feel to them. That's because with the growth in technology, game designers have been able to create more than just a simple one objective game like many prizes of the past. Though these new games do have a main mission, they encourage players to roam the world through side-quests or to just sight-see the programmed realm. Players have more than accepted these changes to the new games. Bissell himself writes, "Because of the freedom they grant gamers, the narrative- and mission-generating manner in which they reward exploration, and their convincing illusion of endlessness, the best open-world games tend to become leisure-time-eating viruses (351)." In other words, Bissell believes that these games, through the ever-changing field of technology, have so much more to offer, and can literally suck you in. Though this may make these games sound like time-leeches, Bissell discloses how when he was in Rome on a literary fellowship, he felt depression wiping over him, and that playing Oblivion, an open-world game, made him feel better by stating that, "they gave me something with which to fill my days other than piranhic self-hatred (352)."

The evolution of these games have been great throughout the years. When they were first made, video games had a simple goal; to entertain people by letting them control pixels across the screen for points. Now, game developers put a lot more thought into what to put into their games. Just by simply adding a scenic background, among other things, games start to bring more than just a sense of accomplishment from destroying some pixels on the screen. These feelings brought about by visually stunning and quirky have led people to start to see it as a new form of art. Bissell makes this point by stating, "Once video games shed their distinctive vector-graphic and primary-color 8-bit origins, a commercially ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what might as well the most visually derivative popular art form in history (354)." He then bluntly states, "Most modern games - even shitty ones - look beautiful (355)." Here, Bissell is points out in a no nonsense way that most, if not all, game designers hold the art aspect of their games to a higher standard than the other parts.

There is one consequence that goes with spending this time on the scenery of a game; the story can seem to be pretty generic. Bissell explains, "Games have grown immensely sophisticated in any number of ways while at the same time remaining stubbornly attached to aspects of traditional narrative for which they have shown little feeling (358)." Though literature itself is a great form of art, it sometimes can be overlooked in writing a game. Not to say all games are this way, there are definitely well-written games out there, it's just that the games publicized the most tend to be either games based on other games or yet another sequel of a previous well received game. The counterclaim to this though is that "such games are more about the world in which the game takes place than the story concocted to govern one's progress through it (Bissell 359)." The essence of Bissell's argument is that since the developers who created the video games of yesteryear had limited tools, they would focus more on the story, but now that they can build realistic