Category: gaming

Final Fantasy XV Director: “An All-Male Party Makes Final Fantasy XV ‘More Approachable”

In a recent interview, Final Fantasy XV Director Hajime Tabata responded to questions of why the upcoming game features an all male cast for playable characters. His response already has the internet in uproar, but let’s look at it critically:

“Speaking honestly, an all-male party feels almost more approachable for players. Even the presence of one female in the group will change their behaviour, so that they’ll act differently. So to give the most natural feeling, to make them feel sincere and honest, having them all the same gender made sense in that way

Before we label Tabata the next coming of the anti-Christ (You meet that guy the first time around? He was a jerk!), we should probably get the whole story. Habata has already discussed how he wanted the game to feel like a round-trip with friends, and wanted the game’s theme to deal with male to male intimacy in ways that we hadn’t seen in games prior (No, not the male intimacy only dating sims can show). Let’s not dance around it: He’s trying to show a bromance between four different characters and to accurately create this bromance he’s excluding female characters because he thinks their presence would naturally change the dynamic of the group.

…He’s not wrong? This isn’t to say that a group of males can’t hang out with a female without having their friendships dramatically altered, but if your theme is male bonding and what males are like when females aren’t around then a female character certainly will have a dramatic effect on that theme. Funnily enough, the lack of female characters really hadn’t been that big of an issue with most gamers until Tabata made this statement, which can be taken some different ways.

Tabata further had to say:

The world might be ready to see the curtain lifted on what boys do when girls aren’t around, when they come out of the tent all prim and proper. That’s kind of the idea behind it… we think, male or female player, that everyone will feel a certain connection and bond with the four characters

…Hopefully what Tabata has been doing when girls aren’t around is PG and not strange and bizarre. He’s really trying a little too hard to justify something that is kind of a non-issue, which makes it seem like a bigger issue.

Ah damn, we have bigger problems with this game…

So, should we be outraged by the team excluding female characters and thinking that a female character would change the dynamic of a game with a theme of male bonding? Probably not. The Final Fantasy franchise is many things, but I wouldn’t call it a franchise that is particularly male dominated….Though its representation of females isn’t all that positive in parts (Seriously, what mechanics dress like that?). In the end, it’s a narrative driven game with a specific narrative that unfortunately doesn’t lead to female characters being incorporated into the gameplay. Unlike with games like Assassin’s Creed Unity, which purposefully chose not to include female characters despite the characters being customizable and blank, you can’t really fault a developer for wanting a specific narrative and creating characters that only fit that narrative.

We’ll have to wait and see until the game is released to judge for ourselves whether or not the exclusion of playable female character really does increase the male bonding dynamic between the characters.

Nintendo Celebrates Women’s History Month

Nintendo’s been making some headlines this week with their announcement that they’ll soon be entering the smartphone app world, but they’ve also been hard at work highlighting some of their memorable female characters in honor of Women’s History month.

Here are the characters they highlighted:

In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, Princess Zelda was actually a tough and spunky captain of a ragtag group of pirates. Tetra saves Link from Ganondorf’s clutches, and later helps Link defeat Ganondorf for good to save the world.


Toadette is a recurring Toad character in the Mario series. These days, she’s a plucky treasure-hunter in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, who puts on a brave face to find rare goodies and save Captain Toad from the monstrous and greedy bird, Wingo.


Bayonetta is a sassy and incredibly stylish witch with pistol-stilettos and a vendetta against the armies of angels and demons that hunt her. She’s a force to be reckoned with, an ally to her best friend and fellow witch Jeanne and doesn’t take flak from anybody.

Rosalina is an interstellar observer, protector of the Lumas and friend to Mario in Super Mario Galaxy. She is mother to the Lumas, who are little star-like creatures capable of becoming new galaxies!

Lucina is an unwavering warrior with a strong sense of justice and commitment to her family. Her power, determination and wisdom gained from watching the destruction of her world are priceless strengths as one of Fire Emblem Awakening’s many playable female protagonists.

Samus Aran shocked the video game world at the end of the original Metroid game by revealing her gender and changing the way we think about video game characters in the process. Video game protagonists need not be male in order to be strong. Samus is a space bounty hunter in an armored suit, outfitted with a powerful blaster on the arm and extreme heat resistance.

Bombette is a Bob-omb who joins Mario on his quest in the original Paper Mario for the Nintendo 64. As a member of Mario’s diverse team of fighters, she has an explosive fighting style and isn’t afraid to get physical with her body slam and powerful bomb attacks. – 

Let’s not lie about it: Nintendo hasn’t exactly been the most forward thinking developer in their history, but they have made some strides to being a more inclusive and representative developer in the last couple of years. That said, some odd choices on some of the characters they chose; Bayonetta isn’t a Nintendo character and Bombette hasn’t seen the light of day since the year 2000. But, something is better than nothing…Right?

Strong Museum (NY) Is Creating Video Game Hall of Fame

“Video games don’t belong in museums, that’s where we put old chairs and paintings of dead people” – no one ever.

The Strong Museum in New York, more commonly known as the national museum of play, is taking nominations for a video game hall of fame. Gamers across the world can go online and vote for which games they believe should be immortalized in the museum’s hall of fame. Before you go rushing to vote Battle Toads & Double Dragon as the most historically important video game of all time, you may want to know some background as to why they’re creating this hall of fame.

Why and how are they doing this? Well, as President and Chief Executive of the museum puts it:

“Electronic games have changed how people play, learn and connect with each other, including across boundaries of culture and geography”

That’s what we’ve been saying for year! Joking aside, it’s good to see video games get more of an academic and historical presence. The creation of a video game hall of fame is one step towards video games being properly preserved for future generations, which as we discussed in previous articles is a real issue in the community.

Games will be decided by a advisory committee and will inducted based on a set criteria. The criteria is as follows:

The World Video Game Hall of Fame recognizes electronic games that meet the following criteria: icon-status, the game is widely recognized and remembered; longevity, the game is more than a passing fad and has enjoyed popularity over time;geographical reach, the game meets the above criteria across international boundaries; and influence, the game has exerted significant influence on the design and development of other games, on other forms of entertainment, or on popular culture and society in general. (A game may be inducted on the basis of the last criterion without necessarily having met all of the first three.)

This means that hall of fame won’t just include the highest selling games of all times, but will take into consideration a game’s impact on the industry and society as a whole. Let’s try  and get some of those socially important games in there, like Joe & Mack (It’s a historical documentation about how cavemen loved women and hated dinosaurs). This is a big step for the medium, which is still relatively underrepresented in museums as a whole. In the next few years with Frisco’s first museum dedicated solely to video games and this creation of a hall of fame, we may see video games getting more historical and sociological coverage and representation than ever before.

What games, characters, or franchises would you put in the Video Game Hall of Fame?

You can read the entire press release here!

Can Video Games Create Empathy and Awareness for Real World Issues?

NPR recently reported on a experimental Virtual reality game that attempts to create a connection between participants and a conflict happening thousands of miles away. “Project Syria”  is a project coming out of University Southern California (USC) that is utilizing virtual reality hardware to make an intimate experience that generates awareness and empathy for the civil war in Syria.  You may be saying to yourself “Hey, wait. I don’t want to play a game that puts me into a depressing scenario! I just wanna play  Animal Crossing and electronically prune trees!” but let’s open our mind up alittle, WILL YA.

You can watch a non-virtual reality demo of the game here. For those not willing to watch, the demo puts you in the middle of a town with people walking around conversing. Over the sounds of street hustle and bustle you can hear a young girl singing. Then, without warning, a bomb goes off and all sounds are immediately replaced with ringing. The town then becomes full of dust and the scene is one of tragedy and disaster.

Project Syria is one of the first virtual reality demos to be used to gain awareness for real world issues, but it certainly isn’t the first game to be designed to create awareness for an issue. In fact organizations like Games for Change  and TAKE ACTION GAMES have creating games to bring awareness to social issues for over a decade.  The game to create the biggest waves was arguably MTV’s “Darfur is Dying” released online in 2006, in which players took up the role of a family displaced by conflict in Darfur.

As they discuss in the NPR piece, Video games have the unique place in media as having the ability for more immersion than other forms. Movie goers can watch a film, create a connection to the movies character and plot, and then immediately disconnect. Video games expand those connections by giving the player choices and decisions that directly effect the character and plot, thus creating a stronger and longer lasting connection. Naturally then, video games have the ability to create great levels of empathy and awareness than other forms of media because the ties are that much stronger.

As Nonny de la Peña says in her interview with NPR “”I sometimes call Virtual reality an empathy generator….It’s astonishing to me. People all of a sudden connect to the characters in a way that they don’t when they’ve read about it in the newspaper or watched it on TV.”

Now obviously we’re probably not going to see most mainstream games take on social issues (Super Mario Syrian Crisis isn’t a title we’ll see anytime soon), but as game technology develop more and more we’ll definitely see video games used as social teaching devices, which is something we’re already seeing in schools. The question then becomes how and when we should use video games as tools for social change effectively, and that answer isn’t exactly clear yet.

Let me know what you think: Are video games good tools for social change? What experiences have you had? Are the tools of the future for creating empathy? Do you want to crowdfund “Super Mario Syrian Crisis”?

“Gaming While Black”

We’re back in 2015 (THE YEAR OF THE FUTURE) with more sociology and gaming.  To start us off, here’s a great piece: posted on Joystiq a few days ago, Jessica Conditt’s piece “Gaming While Black” is a very informative and well put together article on the current state of race in gaming. I’d recommend checking out the whole article, as it brings up a lot of sociologically interesting facets of the lack of racial diversity in gaming, which is still a relatively not talked about thing.

Here are some great bits from the article.

One the issue of the lack of diversity in voices of color in video game media:

“The games industry is hurting badly as a creative medium in terms of diverse voices,”Treachery in Beatdown City developer Shawn Alexander Allen told me. “We don’t see many prominent black or Latino (or really any other minority populace) representation in protagonists, critics, marketing or creators. I mention prominent because while many other cultural forms like music, movies and writing have a dearth of black voices, they at least have people who are out there making their culture better at all levels and are very visible.”

It’s true. The majority of the professional industry is still predominantly white. A recent demographic survey of gaming developers attending the IGDA  found that nearly 80% of attendees reported being white.

On the issue of the isolation of gamers of color:

“Most gamers of color have isolated themselves into private parties, private chats, or just don’t engage verbally at all,” Dr. Gray said. “And that’s sad because they can’t take full advantage of the gaming experience that they paid for. So what’s happening is a virtual ghettoization of minority gamers. […] Because a person’s identity is automatically revealed when a person speaks, they are targeted. I call it linguistic profiling. As soon as someone hears how you sound, they engage in this practice. They hear how you sound and react based on that. So a lot of black gamers are called derogatory terms because of how they sound. They don’t have to do anything but sound black.”

On why we’re seeing racism in online gaming communities:

“Gaming culture is a direct reflection of our society,” she said. “The only reason racism and sexism run rampant in gaming is because racism and sexism run rampant in society. But in physical spaces, mostly, it’s not overt. It’s subtle. It’s covert. So, yes, these issues manifest in a similar manner in gaming, but I contend that they present themselves worse. It’s not subtle. It’s in-your-face racism. A black person may not be called a nigger to their face, but they can almost guarantee it will happen in virtuality.”

Again, it’s a great article that is really well researched and well put together. Please go check itttt outttt.

EFF Files Petition For Users’ Rights to Play and Preserve Abandoned Video Games

The Electronic Frontier Foundation  (EFF) has filed a petition to allow consumers to modify their games to enable users to continue playing after video game companies have abandoned certain features in the game. This seems like a obvious push, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. With so many games offering online components it is inevitable that eventually the servers and networks for these games will cease to run, leaving some parts of the games completely unplayable and unusable. For example, If Petz’s online servers get shut down years after the game is released, the EFF is fighting for the rights of users to disable authentication checks and allow them to connect to third party servers..

I’D RATHER DIE THAN NOT BE ABLE TO PLAY PETZ ONLINE – No One Ever

This has already happened with many popular games, including Star Wars Battle Front 2 and Phantasy Star Online. Once the official servers for these games are cut off, the only way to play the games have been third party, unofficial servers. Often time this requires patches or specific go-arounds to get the games to play on these servers and, more often than not, these servers are technically operating illegally. While it sounds ridiculous, that video game companies would be against outside sources prolonging the life of their games after they themselves have shut down online components, there has been cases in which companies have shut down third party attempts.  The EFF is seeking to empower the users to enable them to continue playing their games, socially and happily, for years after certain titles are no longer profitable to the company.

The EFF’s Justification:

As archivists can attest, there are a number of ways in which digital media in general are more fragile than physical media. The law should not be exacerbating that problem. But with video games in particular, legal restrictions on preserving and maintaining functionality threatens to wipe out communities of players that participate in competitive or collaborative play.

In an ideal world, publishers wouldn’t encumber their software with restrictive DRM, mandatory authentication schemes, or proprietary multiplayer protocols. In the meantime though, gamers should be allowed to continue playing the games they’ve legally purchased without a cloud of legal uncertainty hovering over them.

It all seems pretty reasonable, but we’ll see if anything actually comes out of the EFF’s attempt. They are an organization known for being quite successful when it comes to fighting for the rights of digital mediums. Go check out their website!

Nonprofit Creates Online Arcade of Classic Games

The Internet Archive released 900 classic games from bronze age of gaming available to play on your browser. Don’t go expecting Nintendo games like Legend of Zelda, but you certainly have a wealth of classic games like Outrun and Galaga.

447135-internet-arcade

What is the Internet Archive and why are they allowed to do this?

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format…..

Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world

TLDR; They’re creating an online database of audio, texts, and software for everyone to have access to. Pretty sweet, especially considering physical copies of games are becoming increasingly rare and unusable due to the hardware expiring. An online database of games and software ensures that gamers and historians can play these games for years and years to come. If you’re a student seeking to learn about early gaming, or just someone with some time on their hands to kill, go and play!

Bayonetta: Female Devs and Gamers Share Their Opinion

The Bayonetta franchise is getting a lot a buzz recently because of the release of the second game. The series has been that has spurred a lot of debate among gamers for being controversial in regards to how the franchise depicts sexuality and its female characters. Many contend that the character of Bayonetta is a sexualized  male fantasy that poorly reflects on female characters in games, while others argue her sexualization and character design is empowering and purposefully over the top. Having not played the games until this current release, my opinion is purely speculative, but the good people over at Negative World have put together a great article in which they interviewed female gamers and developers to share their insight about the character and the franchise.

One specific question that gets to the heart of the debate:

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#3. How do you feel about the way that the Bayonetta franchise presents its female characters, especially the lead playable character, “Bayonetta”? Do you think there are problematic / sexist elements involved, or “over-sexualization” of the females? On the other hand, do you find Bayonetta, as a “strong female lead” to be an empowering character in any way?

Alicia Andrew: As a developer, sexualization of characters is a topic that’s come up in some great discussions. I use Bayonetta as an example of “sexy” done right. A lot of the discussion about female representation seems to get stuck at whether its appropriate for a character to be “sexy”. Some people see the discussion around the dislike for the “chain-mail bikini” as a form of censorship or a push towards characters they see as potentially boring or downright prudish. I see the discussion as more nuanced than just an issue of cleavage. In my opinion, it’s an issue of ownership.

Its complicated, but I think desperately important, that while we understand that sexuality is healthy and has a place in our media, a lot of the backlash around the proverbial “chain-mail bikini” is because often, the female character is made to be sexualized not sexy. She has little to no perceived ownership of how her body is displayed, dressed, or presented. This mindset leads to sometimes ridiculous character designs, such as Mythril Bikinis for the epic journey to the gates of hell, and breasts on alien rock creatures.

To me, Bayonetta owns her sexuality. It seems, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that the tight pants, the flirty quips, the languid posing, are all that character’s choice. Bayonetta, the character, enjoys her sexuality. She is choosing to display it in this manner, and is inviting you in on the fun. It’s wonderfully refreshing to have a character that seems in control of her sexy bits. She’s not a inanimate object with breasts heaving in the wind, but a woman flirting. To me that’s sexy done right.

To clarify, I’m not saying that we should take away titillating armor mods in Skyrim, or anything of that nature. But if you want to have a female character be more than just decoration, AND you want her sexuality to be part of that character, then creating that sense of ownership is important.

In this I think Bayonetta has done something great, and a lot of female players have responded to it. Initially I had no interest in the game, filing it into the “another game with heaving breasts” category. A friend of mine talked my ear off about how much she loved it, and why. I gave it a shot, and loved all of it. If I had the height, I’d cosplay the hell out of Bayonetta or Jeanne.

Emily Gitelman: I think the female characters in Bayonetta are presented incredibly poorly, and certainly over sexualized. They’re a male fantasy, completely. I’m going to focus on Bayonetta herself. To start with her physical appearance, Bayonetta is built like a super model, has a sexy English accent, and walks around in a skin-tight catsuit that disappears and basically gives her censor bars when she casts spells. It’s practically a reward for the player: use a powerful attack; see a naked woman. As soon as Bayonetta displays power, she is stripped of her clothing and her dignity. When her health runs too low, her catsuit also disappears. The symbolism (lip marks, flowers, butterflies) used in her attacks is very stereotypically feminine in a way that box female sexuality into a narrow category. These are calculated ways of making her seem like a Strong Female Character, but they actually undercut her agency and power as the lead character of a franchise.

It’s insulting to think that Bayonetta could be viewed as a positive, empowering character because she is plainly a sex object. When Hideki Kamiya, the director of Bayonetta, and Yusuke Hashimoto, one of the producers on the project, were making the interview rounds, they said really sexist things about women. In an interview with 1UP, Hashimoto said that Bayonetta couldn’t be over sexualized because she didn’t have large breasts (which is obviously not the only facet of over sexualization). In the same article, he said that Bayonetta isn’t “all about showing skin,” but she’s constantly on display as a sex object because of her tight outfit, posture, and husky voice.

Basically, the men in charge of how Bayonetta is portrayed have made their opinions about how women should look and dress and be visually appealing to themselves and other men make it entirely obvious that Bayonetta is treated as a sex object. Because of that, I definitely don’t find Bayonetta to be empowering. In fact, she is the opposite.

Erica Hollinshead Stead: I somewhat ventured into this question’s territory above. I don’t think that something can be “certified” non-sexist, to use a phrase I read somewhere and can’t remember where. I also don’t know if I necessarily go in for the “strong female lead” thing. Certainly, I want a world where most female characters aren’t the embodiment of weakness. But I’m not sure that “strong” makes top of my list of adjectives I want to use to describe more female characters. If I were to throw out some words that might top my list, it would likely be something like “individual”, “unique”, “complex”, “well defined”, maybe even “multi-faceted”. I feel like Bayonetta meets a few of these.

Tangent aside, after having played the game, I do not find Bayonetta’s character problematic. Its a complex set of factors that lead me to that conclusion, one being that Bayonetta has, in my opinion, unique aspects to her aside from sexuality/sexualization. Even just appearance wise, Bayonetta has a specific aesthetic aside from “sexy” – I feel as if I could choose clothing that she would like at a mall – not just any old sexy thing from Victoria’s Secret is going to be her taste; just grabbing a garment because it is revealing wouldn’t be her taste. I also think the humor and tongue-in-cheek aspect of the dialog is context that matters. Bayonetta feels very “in on the joke” if you can say that about a fictional character; it felt to me as if when she utilized sexy stylization, she was making a choice to style herself that way. Its certainly subjective, but to me, Bayonetta felt like a full character who was self-styling herself as a cavalier vampy goth badass, rather than a shell of male fantasies.

I think that its the environment that Bayonetta the game exists in that causes the perception of Bayonetta as sexist more than Bayonetta the character in the game. It is a world in which developing a full female character IS often sacrificed for sex appeal and stereotypes, and a realistic gender ratio is often traded for a single token girl that only provides a single vision of women. But I do think its important to leave room for the possibility that sexy doesn’t always equal bad. For me, many of the things cited as “bad” about Bayonetta could be charges leveled at me. If Bayonetta’s hip pop and tight outfit are bad, then how can I not be “part of the problem” if I gravitate towards tight (or god forbid revealing) clothing, and tend to stand with my hip popped, AND want to create and see characters that are similar to me in that aesthetic? I want to see more female characters who aren’t sexy in that way too, but it doesn’t mean I never want to see a character who fancies herself a pin up.

I have seen some marketing pieces for Bayonetta that I do think lack the full picture of Bayonetta’s character, and so I understand how one could see them and be concerned. Its hard to contain all of the nuance in a still image for example. But, having played the game I do not find the game itself problematic.

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It’s a great piece and one well worth reading, so please go check it out. You can also go purchase Bayonetta 2 (which includes the original) and formulate your own opinion. Controversy aside, it seems to be a thrilling game to play. As always, please share your opinions and perspective.

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Part 2

A Threat Against Sarkeesian Should Be Seen as A Threat To The Entire Gaming Community

This week Anita Sarkeesian cancelled a speech at Utah College after the school received a threat of a mass shooting if Sarkeesian was allowed to speak. The school decided to go ahead with the speech after consulting law enforcement officials, but Sarkeesian decided to cancel the speech after learning that students with a valid concealed arms permit would be allowed to openly carry concealed weapons during the presentation, as is allowed by law.

Let’s glance over the fact that the school had to legally allow people with weapons to attend the speech after threats claimed that the proposed shooting would be the “deadliest school shooting in American history” because open carry laws are  horrendously backwards and ridiculous. The treatment that Sarkeesian is receiving is the issue I wish to focus on in this post.  Of course the person making these threats against Sarkeesian doesn’t represent the gaming community nor those who disagree with Sarkeesian’s videos and opinions, but it does represent an greater issue in the community as a whole.  Sarkeesian, whose videos have focused on reoccurring themes in video games that dehumanize and trivialize women, is an academic, proponent, and a member of the video game community. Threats, violence, and dismissal are no ways to respond to those with opinions and perspectives that we don’t share. The amount of backlash and vile given from people in the gaming community towards Sarkeesian and other video game academics who seek to challenge the norm has been absolutely unsettling and unwarranted.  Death threats aside, we as a gaming community should not stand for name calling, dismissals of opinions without proper argument, or anything of the sort. We need to show to the community and the world that these types of threats and acts are NOT OKAY. A great portion of the world still sees the gaming community as one that is  uneducated, and childish; we need to show them that we are not.. We need to stand up for those who are attacked, regardless of if we agree with their perspective or not. An attack on Sarkeesian should be seen as an attack on the gaming community. If free speech and the conversing on differing ideas and perspectives can’t be allowed in our community then we all suffer. The gaming community needs to come together on this issue or face losing the blossoming diversity we have cultivated in recent years.

Sarkeesian’s Website

University Recognizes Video Games as a Varsity Sports

Robert Morris University has become the first University to recognize  competitive video games as a varsity sports. Does this mean we’ll soon see stadiums full of crowds cheering on a game of “Blades of Steel”?

FINISH HIM!

Probably not. Robert Morris University, a non-profit university in Chicago, is offering a scholarship under their athletic division for competitive “League of Legends” players. The scholarship, which cover roughly half the cost of tuition and board, is being offered to potential students.  The team will play other competitive teams from around the country in hopes of making it to the North American Collegiate Championship, where participants can earn up to 30,000 in scholarships. This isn’t the first team we’ve seen come out of a University, as many big name university have teams, but it’s the first time we’re seeing scholarship money and athletic recognition given to a competitive gaming team. While the scholarship is currently only for competitive League of Legends players, it’s not unreasonable that one day we’ll see that expanded out to other games and genres. Although don’t hold your breath, competitive “Diddy Kong Racing” players.

The competitive gaming scene has been widely developing in the past years, and it’s no longer just introverted gamers watching on Twitch at home. Competitive gaming even has its own structured league with  Major League Gaming (MLG). Competitive video game sports athletes have made entire living off their game playing, including by getting sponsorships from companies. It’s big stuff, and if this recognition of gaming as an athletic sport is any indication of the scene’s trajectory it’s likely to keep on growing. Of course the scene also has its naysayers, including ESPN’s president John Skipper who said video games weren’t a sport.

It’s a competition, right? I mean, chess is a competition, and checkers is a competition. … I’m mostly interested in doing real sports.

Thanks for your insight, Skipper!

He went onto say that he didn’t think a hoagie was a sandwich, frozen yogurt isn’t ice cream, and margarine isn’t butter.

Who knows where we’ll see competitive gaming go from here. Unlike traditional sports, it’s not a singular activity; with so many types of games out there that range in how you play who knows how video games will fall into the ranks of competitive gaming. Nevertheless,  video games are developing as a social activity in new ways and becoming a bigger part of our society.