We all know that these videogames are pleasurable and easy to defend. But should we want more for our money. Is the industry simply cashing in on our weaknesses? Isn't it about time we listened to the gainsaying voices?
Simon Kirrane

Videogames provide a substandard experience
These things have to be qualified every time we refer to them and the qualification is one of inferiority: videogames and virtual reality, sims/simulations, hampered representations, substandard experiences, we are referring here to fakes, this is not virtual reality this is non-reality.

Videogames don't even offer the level of reality of any other pastime; daydreams have better graphics and sound and are more engrossing. Five seconds of your own mental meandering can immerse you more deeply in a fake world than any bag of bytes. If you don't believe me, why do novels (that's some words on paper tech-heads) outsell videogames?

Videogames are not any fun
In an attempt to lure in potential gamers all the stops are pulled out, the gloves are taken off and morals are tossed out of the window. Take a look at any random cross section of videogames and you'll soon be confronted by that deadly trinity of marketing tools: sex, death and licenses.

Sure enough, these things exist in other media but not in the mainstream to the extent that videogames rely on them. And the reasons for this reliance must only be that, without the hooks (or stimuli as behavioural psychologists would have it) we wouldn't buy and play them (that will be a triggered response then).