It's taken me nearly 16 years of gaming to come to a fairly obvious and simple realization: video games unify people. They bridge the gap between age, gender, race and nationality in ways only books, television, and tragedies seem able to do. I came to this mind numbingly obvious conclusion last night while fragging and getting fragged by my 42 year old brother ( said brother is 18 years older than me) in a Halo match. This realization struck me so suddenly that I played on auto-pilot for the rest of the match as I thought about; and as a result died a whole lot. Though, really I don't know why this surprised me so much.
Back in the day when NES was cutting edge my dad would take time out of his 60-70 hour work week to play Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Mission Impossible, and other games with me; my older brother would come home for the holidays when I was younger and we'd fire up whatever system I had at the time and play into the early hours of the morning; raising hell as children my friends and I would go over to whoever's house was closets and play Zelda or Final Fantasy-insert roman numeral here- and sip capri sun after we'd exhausted ourselves outside; one of my fondest memories of my adolescent's was when my father fired up Doom for the first time on his brand new Micron computer, discovered the chainsaw and laughed as he proceeded to lay into demon after demon; since I entered the work-force at sixteen only 2 of my bosses haven't gamed ( one of my current bosses plays Halo and Call of Duty and I take way to much satisfaction when I kill him on-line); I met a chick at Starbucks who was quite possibly the biggest Halo and Kingdom Hearts fan I've ever seen; my last girlfriend, along with introducing me to foreing films, loved to cozy up with me on the couch on rainy days and play Super Smash Brothers and Mario Golf. And then there's the hundreds of people I've played, talked to, and generally had a great time with on-line from all over the globe. Many of whom would probably have nothing to do with me in the real world. It doesn't even matter what type of game you play, they all have the same end result. Unity.
It all makes me wonder if only our leaders would just sit down and play a game, any game, would they solve more of the important problems in the world instead of bickering along party lines?