by David Aaron White

Created on: June 19, 2008   Last Updated: November 01, 2008

The gaming community does in fact hold great importance in the modern day world. Think, Blizzard's popular title World of Warcraft alone has over seven million annual subscribers and growing. Games such as Halo 3 have become so popular that when mentioned in passing conversation, even elderly people who have probably never even played the game before will have some idea of what the game is. Let's face it, video games are progressively becoming a larger part of modern day culture around the world, and our culture is rather important to us, isn't it?

Classic games were the first to help propel the gaming community into existence and evolution. For example, countless television shows have staged spoofs of Super Mario Bros., referred to Tetris as a way to stack various objects in an automobile (that's the Simpsons for you), and even helped create video games based off of them. See, once the classic games emerged in growing parts of our culture, such as television (which is becoming too prominent in our culture too quickly), people started talking about them in length and forming communities based around fan clubs and forums. When newer technologies including the internet and online-capable consoles were introduced, these communities could be updated very quickly, advertise in more venues, and as a result accumulate more members. Soon, the gaming community became not just a series of fan sites and clubs, but a network of people who shared tips about gaming, set up clans and online matches and even discussed upcoming games.

With a myriad of members, a plethora of websites, and thousands upon thousands of games being played daily, the gaming community is an aspect of someone's life, for better or for worse. Many gamers attest to feeling accomplished because of the feats they have undertaken in various video games, and thus devote more than four hours a day to playing games (of course, they may view it as practice). For example, I've been playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for a few years now and have an incredibly skilled character whose best attribute is 146/100 due to all of the magical effects I have found and stacked on him. Really, this character is all but invincible, and I devote about an hour a day to finishing the last few quests and further improving my character in the mad hope that he may ascend to the throne of a lesser deity. And I fell very proud of myself for creating this all-powerful mage, mainly due to the Xbox 360's gamerscore system.

The Xbox

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