What Would People Do If There Were No Video Games?

It’s hard for any of us under thirty to remember a time before video games.  I mean, I practically cut my teeth on the soft rubbery goodness of my Atari 2600 controller’s joystick.  I spent my teenage years pestering my parents for quarters I could drop into the machines at the arcade in the back of my local drugstore (probably accumulating to a year or two of tuition for the community college.)  My first “big ticket” purchase was a PC so I could play a Star Wars game.  My life has been full of video games (some great and some not-so.)  But there was a time without video games!

Yes that’s right; there were days way back when before we were able to plug into those lovely little boxes, stare at the pretty lights, and sit idly by as our brains slowly turned to mush.  I spent those days playing with sticks with nails driven into them, literally.  So what would happen if an alien race came down to earth and fried all the Xboxes, Playstations, and Wiis with their death rays? 

In short, pandemonium, mass hysteria, financial ruin, and total collapse of the world order . . . and then things would get back to normal.

Think about it, what are video games but digital representations of real life?  You don’t have to have a Wii‘mote in your hand to play tennis, paintball is just as much fun a first-person-shooter, and if we spent a little less time playing at space travel we may actually be able to make that happen someday.  I mean, do you really believe man landed on the moon?  (Not according to the “last gen” hit Area 51—starring David Duchovny.)

Of course it wouldn’t hurt the nation’s mid-section to get away from the games for a while either.  Seriously, America is the fattest country in the world and we’re the ones who spend the most time in front of our electronic gizmos.  We’ve even made portable gizmos and games that play on our cell phones so we can take our games with us.  Leave all those behind and we could even become the most productive nation in the world (beat that Japan!)

Will it ever happen?  Not likely.  Video games were invented to suck away our attention, keep us engrossed, and allow us to escape from the real world.  The very first was a game called Tennis for Two that was played on an oscilloscope for crying out loud!  We didn’t even have the technology to play games and we were still playing games!

However, the video game industry has grown into a legitimate industry providing hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars worldwide.  Without that injection of cash, the world economy would tank—unless we found better places for our money to go.  Why not build a space station on Mars or explore the bottom of the ocean with all that cash?  We could stop global warming and prevent the extinction of the species of the rainforest. 

Maybe we could even start making good movies again and wouldn’t have to rely on video games based on movies and movies based on video games.  Seriously, without Blood Rayne, Postal, Alone in the Dark, and Dungeon Siege would Uwe Boll, that cantankerous German, have ever had a career?

However, those are all lofty goals.  What do I think would really happen without video games?  I think we’d resort to a Mad Max-style life where people substituted violent sports for violent video games.  Instead of shooting zombies, we’d shoot each other.  Instead of clobbering Orcs, we’d bean each other. 

And what would become of the “casual gamers” or the girls?  They would be sitting pretty in their gardens trying to grow magical sunflowers or teaching their pet kittens to play with balls of string.  (Who plays those girl games anyway?  Not even the girls!) 

So perhaps a world without video games wouldn’t be utopian at all. 

A lot of our current technology has been developed for or by the video game industry.  Would PCs seriously need such heavy-hitting video cards without video games?  Where would that leave movie producers?  Back in the Stone Age with plastic models and real pyrotechnics, that’s where. 

And televisions . . . don’t even get me started.  Modern televisions were pretty much built specifically for gaming.  I mean, high definition graphics, built in HDMI ports, USB ports, Composite video cable ports—none of that’s for watching TV! 

And what about automobiles?  They’re controlled by CPUs now and have built in directional units with graphical interfaces and voice activation capabilities—driving itself has become a video game!

What about smart phones?  Sure you can send documents and give presentations with the hardware in your pocket but you know they were built for fart apps and digital beer. 

Though people may gripe about the money and time “wasted” on video games, the industry itself and the developers behind the lovely little digital realities have truly made wide-reaching and important advances without which the modern world would be boring and life would be a whole lot harder.