BA7 - Contextual Studies - Entry1

So, I have decided to start with the question: ‘What is it that makes people spend so much time in virtual worlds?’ I came to this question after just thinking about video games for a while.  The amount of time in people’s lives video games consume astounds me. People spend most of their lives in front of a screen of some description.  When it comes to video games though, what is it that draws audiences in and holds their attention for so long?

For an example, ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ has a little counter, which is visible before a player is about to jump into a multiplayer game. This counter gives varying statistics about the worldwide audiences actions in the game. One shocking statistic I found, was that collectively, players all across the world have spent over 10,000 years playing ‘Call of Duty’: Black Ops’. The last time I checked this counter, was well over a year ago. At the time of writing, three more Call of Duty games have been released every November. I find this amount of time completely ridiculous.  And that’s just one game, and more than that, what if it was only displaying the time spent on the Playstation3 platform alone?! ‘Call of Duty’ games are typically released on PC and Xbox360 simultaneously with Playstation3.

What makes video games so addictive? Why do so many people play them? How are they so successful? I am not speaking from outside the frame here. Let me be clear in saying that I myself have whiled away hour after hour after hour on video games. Overall, I think everyone, myself included, spend to much time playing video games when theres a lot more to life than just 'Halo' or 'Minecraft'. I don't want to say that games are a bad thing, I think they can be enjoyed like anything else really, in moderation. I want to look at the things that make games so popular and attractive to an audience. To begin, I would say that games can offer people; control, violence, sex, and the means to do things they would never get to do in real life. The first word which springs to mind when I ask myself 'what is it that makes people spend so much time in virtual worlds?' is escapism. 

If we look at film for a comparison, we can see that James Cameron's 'Avatar' and George Lucas' original 'Star Wars' are two of the highest grossing movies of all time, even when adjusted for inflation against all others throughout cinematic history. These two films, are both of the science-fiction genre, both contain lots of action, but more importantly, they are both escapist fantasies.