It’s a fascinating question that I admit has been on my mind more and more these days.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: It wasn’t always like that.

In fact, when the first protests against video games were heard, it was back in the days when the Atari 2600 and its stone age graphics/sounds was still popular and Arcades even moreso, as the games there were light years ahead of whatever you could play at home.

Still, I recall people wondering if video games might be bad for those playing it.  If the aggression displayed on these games is something we should worry about.  For let’s face it, almost every video game created with some notable exceptions involve your character killing someone/something to get ahead.

One of the very first mega-popular video games (after Pong) was Space Invaders…

I couldn’t even guess how many hours I spent playing this game.  For those who haven’t, you’re the little guy at the bottom of the screen and you’ve got four bunkers which protect you from the wave of invaders above you.  They move across the screen and then down, slowly coming your way.  Your job is to shoot and kill these waves of invaders before they kill you.

A short time later Pacman became THE big game of the arcade…

You are Pacman, a yellow dot with a mouth and your job is to navigate the maze you are in and eat all those dots before the four “ghosts” get you.  The bigger dots grant you the temporary power to eat those ghosts…though their demise is always temporary.

Many, many other games followed, both with home systems and in the Arcades (at least until computer technology got so good there was no longer a need for Arcades to exist… you could play better games in the comfort of your home).

Point is, when I heard back then the protests of violence in video games I thought it was beyond silly.  These games, state of the art thought they were back then, were so obviously a fiction that, my younger self felt, only an over-concerned fool would think anyone playing these games would mistake them with reality.

Of course, we’ve come a very long way since then and the question I scoffed at years before I must admit I don’t scoff at now.

The fact is that many games feature spectacular -and sometimes very real– graphics.  Here, for example, is a screen shot from one of the currently hottest video games out there, Battlefield 1:

The level of detail in this image alone is, to put it bluntly, stunning.  I have the game and have played it and everything about the game, visually, is indeed incredible.  If I could somehow go back in time to my Space Invaders playing self and show him that game, I suspect young me would have a meltdown.

Compare the above image with this screen shot from the vector based game Red Baron, one of the most popular games way back then which feature a WWI theme like Battlefield 1:

How about that?!

Thing is, the crudity of the graphics created a sense of unreality to those early games.  We knew we were dealing with a simulation because nothing in real life looked like this.

Not so today.

Laura Miller over at Slate magazine offers an interesting article concerning worries some have that today’s video games with their hyper-realistic graphics and at times very gory/violent themes might eventually make us, if not more violent, perhaps more cruel…

How Video Games Change Us

It’s a fascinating read and, for those who think it leans one way or the other, it is a very even handed, IMHO, article that points out the pros and cons of the argument.

If you’re like me and worry that perhaps today’s more violent video games may have some kind of effect on the players, its a worthy read.