A technology related post in which I talk about one of the less practical applications of technology

I have spent much of my natural born life playing video games. I aspire to be a musician, but half the time I'd rather kill things than write music. In fact, when i write music it is usually a concious effort to pull myself away from a game to write a song. In a ways, it turns music making into something like a job. I have to be like "okay, if do some work, you can play a game." Sad thing is I haven't made a cent for this work.

anyways...

Video games have become increasingly more complicated, and sometimes less accessible to those who haven't grown up playing them. The exception to this of course being the Wii, which has brought gaming to a wider audience; still though, a lot of that wider audience includes players of Wii sports, where you do some virtual form of a activity you would do in real life. That doesn't really encapsulate the so called "hardcore gamers". I'm not denegrating this kind of gaming, its fun and social, but I'm just saying it's a different kind of animal. Those that are really involved in video games spend countless hours getting involved in a story line, building up a chacter, looking for hidden stuff, or whatever. The point being games are more an investement of time than ever. Which brings me to my actual point. The more complicated games have become have made them more prone to problems now than ever. Back in the days of Nes and cartridge based systems, these things never failed except for the occasion of having to blow dust out of game. Now, video game machines have the same problems as pcs, because video game machines increasingly aspire to be pcs. You can look to the Xbox 360's ring of death that has plagued countless gamers for an example of this.

My experience with this has been my ps3. Grand theft auto 4 in particular. I had no problems with my ps3 until this game. This game froze in the beginning of the movie first time i tried. I trieeeeed countless things to try to get it to work. Reinstalling the game (that's something you do with pcs!) disconnecting the internet from the ps3, all kinds of things. After extensive research online, i came to realize that certain batches of ps3's have a hardware defect that hasn't been exposed until gta4. sooo, since my system was out of warranty i had to do a lot of complaining to convince sony to replace my console. I'm awaiting ups to deliver the "coffin" that i will be sending my ps3 in with. Soooo, hopefully all goes well. And hopefully they don't send back a crappy 40 gig which has no b/c (ability to play ps2 games, and ps1 games) and no wifi since the 60 gig i have is not produced anymore......

See all of this? This is the bad part of modern gaming, where you look more ridiculous in the eyes of others because you invest all of this time just trying to get a damn game to work. JUST WORK WELL VIDEO GAMES...WE DON'T WANT ALL OF THOSE JERKS WHO THINK GAMING IS A WASTE OF TIME TO SHAKE THEIR HEAD SMUGLY AT OUR PLIGHT.