Video Game Violence

This past weekend was just another typical weekend in Deerfield. While visiting a friend’s house, we decided to remember our childhood and play games like Mario Party 2 and Super Smash Bros on the N64. While playing these games were fun, I realized the change in video games we grew up with compared to today’s generation. Today there are game like Madden and FIFA where the graphics are so realistic, you feel like you are there. The graphics on a N64 are very pixelated, and the frame rate is much slower. If we look at fighting games though, Super Smash Bros would be a game to play where fictional characters had super powers and you tried to get other characters off the map. Today’s generation plays games like Modern Warfare. These shooter games try to be as realistic as possible. These games show death with blood and shooting a gun at other soldiers. The objective of Modern Warfare is to eliminate the other team. The technology is there to support these types of games having faster processors and discs that can hold more content. I’m sure if the technology today was available ten years ago these same games would be created, but the difference is that there is a large demand today with shooting games. Today there are midnight releases of games, and companies are barely keeping up with demand of the release of their games. Focusing on the N64 the top two selling games for the system were Super Mario 64 at 11.62 million copies. Mario Kart sold a total of 9 million copies. In 2001 the Xbox was released 5 years after the Nintendo N64. The number 1 game sold on the Xbox was Halo Combat Evolved. This is a shooter game selling a record number of games at 5 million copies. The top nine games for Xbox sold were all shooter games. The tenth game, while not a shooter, was still a underground racing game. It was not until the eleventh top game sold that Madden NFL 2005 is noted. I think it is interesting that in five years the change in game styles that were purchased. It wasn’t that these games were not offered for the N64. There were still shooting games like Golden Eye and Contra but they did not sell as many games as the Mario franchise did.