Video Game Stores

Video game stores dot the American landscape and can be found in large cities and small towns. What started as a simple game of Pong in the early seventies turned into a massive 10 billion dollar a year industry that appears to escape even recessionary times with continual increases in sales. While earlier decades saw just the adolescent crowd interested in such games, these adolescents grew into adults who did not find their appetite for these games sated with their teenage years. Instead, these young adults demanded more and higher sophisticated games and the result is they instilled in their children this same love for adrenalin pumping, nerve wracking games and adventures that can be found on monitor screen all across the world. Today, young men and women sit for hours playing fantasy games in which a person can be immersed in roles where the player is the star and hero. For others, they are the special ops forces hunting extremists in the remotest parts of the world.

Video game stores provide games for the varied platforms that are available today, including PS2, PS3, PSP, Wii and Xbox 360. These gaming consoles or platforms in technical jargon provide certain games that are proprietary to their own platform while other games have been configured to play on all of these platforms. Some game consoles have higher sales among certain ethnic demographic groups and certain ages see more pc use than strict gaming consoles. One of the platforms, the Nintendo Wii gives the user the opportunity to actually play sports on the monitor. For example, using a handheld wand, a person can use it as a tennis racquet to play against a video opponent, or pitch or bat against a baseball opponent. Even the elderly population demographic is finding that many of the Wii games that are offered are of interest to keep them active while confined to the indoors. Video game stores, in order to be competitive, must keep up the latest games in their inventory in order to meet public demand.

Video game stores that are attempting to be versatile also often offer the ability to trade in games no longer of interest for either a small down payment on a new game or on a larger down payment on another used game. With the average young person spending many hours each week on mastering all the intricacies of a computer game, the boredom factor can set in quite quickly. While many of the fantasy games have layer upon layer of newly discovered information and trials to test a person's reasoning and joystick skills, many sports and driving games can quickly be mastered and grown tired of quite soon. So it is not surprising that video game stores have recognized that fact and offered many users the ability to trade in hardly used programs for newer ones.

Those persons outside this interest in computer games cannot appreciate the intensity with which many people enter this community of users. This is, for many, an obsession that is perhaps as debilitating as drug dependency can be. Video game stores dispense what many would call a harmless distraction that others more intimately affected would name an addiction. Moodiness, anger and sleeplessness have all been named as signs of an addiction to a game. And if that were not enough, some of the most profitable games of all times for video games stores are also deemed violent, misogynistic and rewarding of homicidal behavior. Hour after hour, a player is urged to rob, pillage and steal, treating everyone in a mean spirited way and that has to have a long term negative impact on the users mind. Is it possible that the mean and cruel world that we are now living in was one of our own making, partially though not totally through the creation of such anti-social pastimes? "Finally brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things." (Philippians 4:8)

Many fantasy and reality games are also sexually explicit, prompting Congress to call for a rating system to be clearly seen on every game container. The ratings run from C for early childhood to teen to A for adults only. The problem lies squarely on the shoulders of parents who often are either oblivious to what their children are playing or more frighteningly, do not care a whit about their gaming habits. Video game stores may differ from location to location and from owner to owner about allowing the sale of certain rated games to minors. Although it can probably be certain that games rated A are not rented or sold to minors by most retailers, the rating of M may be nebulous in terms of restriction to under eighteen purchasers. This ought to be a great concern to all parents who have their children's best interest at heart.

There are many video game stores online that can quickly get any title a person is interested in shipped out and delivered within a few days. But if I were the owner of such an establishment, I would be concerned deeply about news that is coming in 2009. One company in California is developing a system of delivery download to provide almost instant playability of any game over the Internet that used to take hours of downloading before. This means that in the years to come, a large chunk of the money that has gone to video stores will now be made online instead. But that is the nature of this business. The players and the games change daily.