Video games make more money than music, television, and film. Profits clearly don’t mean the world, but in the past two decades alone, it’s difficult to understate just how much games have advanced in terms of storytelling, characters, technology, artistic merit and the cache the medium holds in the modern zeitgeist. It is unmistakaꦬble, but frequently misunders𒉰tood.
Earlier this week, news broke that a 13 year-old teenager from Oklahoma called Willis Gibson was the first person 𒈔in history to beat the NES version of Tetris. Something previously thought only possible via artificial intelligence and modding. But a child has proven decades of assumptions wrong with a truly mind-blowing discovery. In the context of Tetris and gaming history, this is a mammotꦗh accomplishment, as seen in Gibson’s spellbound reaction to beating the game. He doesn’t know what to do next, neither does the small crowd of viewers watching him pull off this feat live.
Like Call of Duty or Mario, Tetris is one of the few world-renown video games that has long bled into the mainstream. It’s a name everybody knows, and I bet the majority of people we walk past on the street could even have a go at humming the theme tune. You assemble a selection of shapes to make lines and score points. To the untrained eye, the fact this game can be considered competitive or seen as a piece of art isꦰ inconceivable. So, when television stations and news outlets picked up on the story and began reporting on it, ignorance wasn’t far behind.
Sky News, one of the biggest news channels in the United Kingdom, hosted a brief report on 🐓Gibson’s historic victory with presenter Jayne Secker. It’s a novelty story in the eyes of particular outlets, and was treated as such with Secker’s somewhat mocking tone that🌳 can be noted in the entire piece, but especially comes to light after going off script at its conclusi♕on.
“As a mother, I would just say step away from the scree🅺n, go outside, get some fresh air. Beating Tetris is not a life goal.”
Secker ultimately treats Gibson’s achievement with derision, believing that to dare have any pride in such a goal is both a waste of time and something other young people should never aspire to. I&rsquo💟;ve always been of the opinion that it’s important to rise above comments and try to consider where exactly they might be coming from, and why video games still occupy an odd position of cultural malaise among certain generations where they are still viewed as nothing but violent, unnecessary playthings designed to poison the minds of children.
This view has existed since before I was born, when every single video game was called the ‘Nintendo’ and mainstream news outlets would jump at every opportunity to show games as a hobby to be ashamed of. It’s this line of thinking that saw Doom linked with the Columbine massacre, Grand Theft Auto become a pariah of moral panic, and Mass Effect treated as a weird sci-fi sex simulator when that could𒅌n’t be further from the truth. Video games are only ever relevant in the eyes of these places if they can be laughed at or be used to hold up a flimsy story attached to societal panic. No matter what, gaming is frequently considered an easy punching bag. To see we still hಞaven’t moved on from that in 2024 is so disheartening.
Video games began life as primitive puzzle games and odes to gratuitous violence, and for those who never bothered to tune into its evolution or consider how things had changed, this view never shifted. It wasn’t able to, at least not without coming to terms with your ingrained prejudice or considering that, like any artistic medium, video games are capable of anything, not just the narrow definitions older generations decided to cram them into out of desperate necessity. 📖But would the masses tune in if you were to take things seriously, or recognise in yourself that video games should be treated with the same reverence as everything else we consume in the media landscap⛎e. Apparently not yet, and who knows when that’ll change.
