Video games

This is a collection of quotes about video games.

Sourced

• The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. [...] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off.
  • Charles Bernstein, "Play It Again, Pac-Man", Postmodern Culture, vol. 2 no. 1 (September 1991)

• Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important.
  • John D. Carmack. Quoted in David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture Chapter 8, p. 120.

• It's tough to "buy American" when a video game sold by a U.S. company has been developed by Japanese software engineers and packaged in Mexico.
  • Barack Obama. About the worldwide video game market. Quoted in "The Audacity of Hope" - Page 175 - by Barack Obama

• Show me your children’s games, and I will show you the next hundred years.
  • Smartbomb by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby

• In a way, trying to impress people with design or personality or whatever works to promote movies doesn't work with games because it takes the focus off the player who is supposed to be the star. The more the player is the star, the better a game you have.
  • Sid Meier, designer of the Civilization video game series. Quoted in The Sid Meier Legacy, gamespot.com

Unsourced

• "Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end"
  • Anonymous

• "All your base are belong to us."
  • "Cats," from an unprofessional translation of the Japanese video game Zero Wing (see engrish)

• "Video games are bad for you? That's what they said about rock and roll."
  • Shigeru Miyamoto

• "I recently learned something quite interesting about video games. Many young people have developed incredible hand, eye, and brain coordination in playing these games. The air force believes these kids will be our outstanding pilots should they fly our jets."
  • Ronald Reagan

• "I played the voice of Bubsy since the beginning."
  • Rob Paulsen

• "All games are about realizing a fantasy, whether it be the fantasy of being a courageous war hero, or the fantasy of being a future space adventurer, or, in the case of some Japanese games, the fantasy of possessing eight prehensile dicks."
  • Zero Punctuation

• "All you need to know is this. There are two kinds of games: games that I stop playing because I've been bored or frustrated into a state approaching rigor mortis, and games that I stop playing because I've just noticed I should have had dinner two hours ago."
  • Zero Punctuation

• "Games, or should I say the potential for games, has only gotten better as technology advances in direct proportion to the worsening of your memory. When the gaming kids of today become the hairy, winding twenty-somethings of the future, they'll be declaring that Halo 3 was miles better than a game of interstellar bum pirates on the astral thought planes of the universal overmind and they'll be just as wrong then as you are now."
  • Zero Punctuation

See also

• Category:Electronic games