Violent video games are both different and have a lot in common with non-violent video games. Some games produce different feelings than others, while others may make you think differently about what you are doing. In any case, I enjoy pretty much all video games and have grown up playing various different genres of video games. Thave a friend who, throughout this entire semester has been trying to get me to come over and play “NBA 2K’16” with him on his Playstation 4. It was just this week that I finally found the time to actually go over and play this video game with him.
I had played this game once before, and have extensively played the previous versions of this game, but I still somehow looked like | knew absolutely nothing about how to play this game because he plays it like nonstop and is extremely good. If you don’t know, NBA 2K games are made to basically mimic the experience of being an NBA player. In them, you can create a person who looks just like you and join an NBA team as a rookie and progress through a career in the NBA. Another feature of these games is the ability to play as an entire team.
For example, when I went over to my friend’s apartment to play “NBA 2K’16”, I played as the Los Angeles Clippers with Chris Paul, Deandre Jordan, and Blake Griffin on my team. My friend played as one of the Philadelphia 76ers teams that had Allen Iverson as point guard. During this game that I played I experienced a variety of feelings and emotions that can be traced back to my highly competitive nature. For example, I went on a 12-4 run when we first started playing the game.
During this time I was super excited because I hadn’t played the game in a very long time and I was keeping up with my friend who is extremely good at the game. I was gaining self-confidence in my game and was constantly thinking about the next basketball move that I was going to make. I was down by about 4 points at the beginning of the second half, so I was still feeling pretty good about my game. From there, however, he went on a huge run that effectively took me out of the game. It was at this time that my self-confidence began to go down and I began to think of other things that are going on in my life at the moment.
I wasn’t nearly as focused as I was in the beginning of the game, even though | still had a little hope and was still trying to catch back up. It was this lack of focus, however, that caused me to fall farther and farther behind in points until the game finally ended. I felt completely normal after the game had ended, except for a feeling of relief that the game was over and that I couldn’t get any further behind in points. Another game that I played this week was “Call of Duty Black Ops 2 Zombies”.
This is quite a violent game in which the only goal is to kill as many zombies as you can before you eventually die. This game can cause a roller coaster of emotions and feelings because of the variety of situations that you get put into. For example, while I was playing this game last week with my roommate l experienced boredom, suspense, frustration, happiness, surprise, and even hope. We started the game with two random people. In the beginning of the game when the zombies are few and far between, I experienced both boredom and frustration.
I experienced boredom because there were hardly any zombies around to shoot so I was basically just standing in one spot for the entire first few rounds. Then, when I would find a zombie somewhere, someone else always seemed to kill it before I could get to it, making it so that I wouldn’t have enough money to get a better gun, which would make it much easier to survive in later waves. As the game began to pick up, the boredom and frustration left and was slowly replaced with feelings of happiness, suspense, and surprise.
The feelings of happiness came around because I was playing pretty well and had just bought pretty much everything I would need for the rest of the game as long as things went according to plan. The feelings of suspense came because I knew that the zombies could start picking up at any moment. I also knew that there very well could be a horde of zombies right around the corner that I needed to get through and that if there was, I would probably be dead shortly after getting there. The surprise can come throughout the game, but happens more frequently in the later waves.
This mostly happens when I am busy with a horde of zombies that push me back into a spot that I think is safe, but turns out to be a window full of zombies that are just about ready to break through. This can also lead to hope because I like to make extremely daring moves from time to time to get away from a horde of zombies. By doing this, there is a huge amount of risk that I’ll get caught and die, but if I do it right, I generally have a ton of space to work with. After a while of playing this game, you always die.
Most of the time I don’t feel any effects after I’m done playing this game, but sometimes I do feel like I am a little desensitized to blood and gore for a while. In conclusion, playing both types of video games produces some kind of emotion or feeling. What those feelings are, however, depend largely on the type of video game that you play. It depends on the amount of violence that you experience while playing, it also depends on the context of that violence and the purpose and parameters of the game itself.
