A question, I’m sure that many of us gamers has had to answer whether it be from an angry parent or from the local high school bully is, why do we play video games? 
My typical response used to be: “Why not? They’re fun! Where else can I jump on a horse and go around with a sword bigger than sense and chop up orcs into teeny tiny pieces?”

This was usually met with an hour-long lecture on how gaming rots your brain, or a wedgie and my lunch poured over me (and that just from my parents). As this answer started to become less satisfactory and I started to get sick of eating lunch out of my hair, I started to look a little deeper.

The best video games, to me, are the ones that have an amazing story to them. You know the kind. The games that leave you itching to get to the next cut scene and not the next level up. The ones that you care more about the characters in-game than you do about half the people at work. Those are the games that have stuck with me the most since I started gaming.

Because of this, my relationship with gaming has always been based on the emotion of it all, the elation of getting Ellie to the Fireflies only to gasp in horror when you realize what they want to do with her; the suspense of sneaking through one of Vaas’ camps; the satisfaction of taking out all the enemies unseen and, of course, the WTF!? of the Bioshock: Infinite ending.

Wadayamean he’s Zachary Hale Comstock!?

All of these emotional responses come from one element of a game or another and that’s what I love about gaming. People often mistake gamers for the kind of people that can sit for hours on Call Of Duty or Skyrim, shooting each other online or devouring the souls of Dragons. While this is true to an extent, that’s not what the majority of the gamers I know enjoy the most about video games. 

What other media can have you as truly immersed in a story like a game? What other media allows you to choose the way a story ends? Or whether you’re the good guy or the bad guy? Don’t get me wrong, films and books are both fantastic means of telling a story and conveying emotion, and they have been for decades, but films or books only have you spectating a story, never really being part of it–watching from the sidelines as the story unfolds.

Games make you part of the story. They allow you to hold the sword that takes down the evil king, they allow you to command an army. They allow you to be part of some amazing stories that can only be seen through the media of gaming.

 So the next time someone asks me “Why do you play video games?” I can say to them: “Why don’t you?”