A Chimp off the Old Block

[Bytor]

Let's preform a rather interesting (and possibly sadistic) social/psychological experience. here's what i want you to do. Pick out one of your friends who is NOT a gamer, obviously gotta be a good friend to help with the experiment though. Tell him you are going to introduce him to the wonderful, wild and wacky world of video games and at the same time teach him about Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Hey, if nothing else perhaps you can use this project in school for a science exhibit or possibly even get funding from a university for your doctoral thesis using this as your premise...hmmm...maybe I'm on to something. Anyhow, I digress, back to the experiment. Here's what we (read you and your friend) are going to do. You are going to start him off on the Playstation 2 (hence known as the PS2) playing four different genres. these genres are platforming, first person shooters, strategic role playing games and traditional role playing games. To represent the different genres we'll have him play Sly Cooper (any Sly game really, pretty much the same IMO) and Jak 3, for the FPS let's go with Medal of Honor (pick one) and Time Splitters: Future Perfect, for the SRPG we'll have Disgaea: Hour of Darkness and Eternal Poison and for kicks we'll let the traditional RPG genre be represented by SMT: Persona 4 and Rogue Galaxy. Now, once again for clarification, you have to pick someone not into video games, in other words we want a total newbie, a video game virgin if you will. Now comes the fun part, at least for you, not sure how our test subject might feel, watching him (or her, for the sake of typing let's call him Frank) play the various games, oh yeah, forgot to mention, we'll want him to play one from each genre at the same time, so good ole Frankie is playing Sly, Medal of Honor, Disgaea and Rogue Galaxy at the same time, well not the EXACT same time but you get what I mean. Then once Frank finishes each game he can move on to Jak, Time Splitters, Eternal Poison and Persona 4. Wow, this is fun! Now, for the truly interesting part. Once Frank finishes each game we are going to supply him with a Playstation 3 (hence known as the PS3) and provide him with four demos. And yep, you guessed it, the four demos will also represent the previously mentioned genres, platforming, FPS, SRPG and RPG. And for the demos I'm going to choose LittleBigPlanet, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Record of Agarest War and Nier to represent the genres, and yes I know I stacked the deck a tad with my choices however, I still feel these choices represent the genres in a fair and equitable way (apples equaling oranges of course). Now, we let Frank play each demo long enough to get the idea behind the game and then (here's comes the true tell tale of the experiment) we ask frank which game he'd like to play more of, and he can only pick one...which one will he pick?
I honestly believe if Frank has led a sheltered life and is not exposed to media he will pick LittleBigPlanet as his first choice, Call of Ops (like what I did there?) as his second choice and probably Nier as third, I think Record brings up the rear. Now, why is that my hypothesis you ask? Remember the statement much earlier about Darwin? Simple evolution my dear chap. My experiment, will, in this scientist humble opinion, show that gamers, for the most part, evolve from platforming to FPS to RPG, although thus admitted some are evolutionary dead ends (the Homo Habilis of the gaming world) and equally thus admitted this evolution does require being raised in a somewhat sterile environment where media is not telling them that NO game is as good as Arkham City, Assassin's Creed III or Black Ops 2, But even with the silly media contaminating my experiment I still say the evolution will hold true, after all, most parents probably won't let their 8 year old play Call of Ops, but Kirby is certainly OK, so...ta-da! My theory is now a proven fact...at least proven enough for me