9 Reasons Video Gaming Will Never Die

You didn't believe all that rubbish yesterday, right?

Video gaming is not doomed. It will never die. Here’s why.

1 – Free-to-play

Games. For free. People will never stop playing them. Because they’re free. Even if they aren't really free, they're still free.

2 – Everyone plays games now

The French government said this week that 80% of France’s population played a computer game in 2013. That probably means only babies and mad old people don’t. It’s happened. “Core” may not be the core of it anymore, but that’s irrelevant. “Gaming,” an increasingly inapposite term, isn’t just going to vanish.

3 – VR space machines

VR may currently exhibit a paradox of, “Wow, this is awesome,” and, “F**king Jesus my stomach’s inverting and my eyes are exploding,” but general developments adumbrate a future of living awesome lives devoid of the horrors of reality. Only gaming will allow this, being the sole interactive digital entertainment medium. It’s coming. And even if the “games” of VR are going to be heterogeneous in hitherto inscrutable ways to the controller-TV-PC systems bothering us at the moment, games they shall be. Gaming is the future.

4 – Killing people

Killing people is one of life’s greatest experiences, a little like watching your children being born or getting drunk enough to s**t in the gutter outside the pub. You may want to kill people – and I certainly do many, many times over the course of a day – but a lifetime in jail is just that tiny bit too much of a cost to follow through. Gaming allows you first-hand approximation of the snapping of the neck, the bulging of the eyes, the final flatulence of the prosaic goon, robbed, and thankfully so, of his tawdry senescence. All the ninny-nonnies moaning about the adverse effect of violence in video games are ignoring one of humankind’s most axiomatic axioms; killing, fantastical or otherwise, feels great.

5 – Shooting guns

Come on. Shooting guns is awesome. Nowhere can you pretend to shoot a gun better than in a video game. Pew pew.

6 – PS4 and Xbox One will get going eventually

Of course they will. In a few years time it’ll be games-a-go-go.

7 – Wii U will get Zelda

You sit there, replete in your immanence, wanking on about Wii U’s death. Then there’s E3. Then there’s Zelda. Then there’s a price cut. Then you buy one. Shut up.

8 – PC gaming’s exploding!

A lot of smaller PC games may not be making a lot of money, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable. I sat in a meeting recently where it was asserted that “Steam has won.” PC gaming’s going nowhere.

9 – A lot of people care a great deal

You see, in a good month we get 3 million people looking at VG247, and we’re hardly the biggest games site in the world. Considering we’re in the middle of console transitions, disc-to-digital transitions and desktop-to-mobile transitions, an awful lot of people want to know about video games. The model may be a little broken, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. TV and music faced similar flux, and you still watch TV and listen to music. You’re hardly about to stop playing games, are you?

Images:

Kitten
VR dude
Crysis
Battlefield
Shuhei
Link
Gabe
Xbox dude