The time and effort put into videogames allow me to relax and unwind after a hard day beating my skull into a desk.
I'm not a creative person normally. The most creative I've ever been was in school, painting Warhammer figurines. I grabbed Banjo-Kazooie last week, on recommendation, thinking I'd play it for a few days, then keep it on hand whenever cousins aged in the single digits come around. This week, I'm frustrated by the game's 200 item limit for building vehicles. Hell, upon hearing about the Rare competition, I uploaded photos of my greatest creation, despite the likelihood of hundreds, possibly thousands of similar vehicles being entered into it, simply because I'd spent a few hours perfecting it and wanted to immortalise it somehow.
Every so often, me and a few mates gather at one of our houses and play videogames. We're all in our late 20s, all have full-time jobs and active social lives. Yet some of the most fun we've had comes from a weekend of drunken Rock Band or Gears of War. We don't spend this time, then forget it. We reminisce at all points of the future. Laughing about the weird glitch with the bouncing head, crying about being unexpectedly bushwhacked by that Tank just moments away from the health spawn and remembering with fondness the time we somehow gold starred a track on Expert. A track that wasn't Creep or Charlene. I can't even remember the track now, just the fact that none of us particularly liked the song, yet we utterly nailed it.
Then again, videogames have always been like this. They're a challenge. Maybe not as much of a challenge as climbing a mountain or painting a self-portrait, but they're a challenge that requires mental discipline and hand-eye co-ordination. We get the same rewarding feeling from our brain when we defeat one or achieve something tremendous in game. So biologically, there's no real difference between videogames and any other hobby. In the end, they're just another means of convincing our brains to release some more of those sweet, sweet dopamines.
