h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Abstraction from real life or war. Video games (so-called console games) are much more realistic because they offer a first-person view (HalfLife, Doom [urk], System Shock, Deus Ex) or deal with things that some people actually do (SimCity, Red Alert, Age of Empires), and they offer more options. It's not a matter of rolling a few dice and flipping a card; there are choices.

On the other hand, video games such as Doom don't offer much choice beyond which gun to use. That's why Deus Ex was superior: it offered several ways around many of its problems, and all these had some basis in reality. For instance, you're assigned to activate a building's power. Do you a) kill everything in your path in such a way as to make Rambo look like a wimp, b) find a route to the power station that doesn't take you past any bad guys, c) sneak right past said bad guys, d) hide and kill them, all of them, so they can never see you. You need to steal a certain item; do you a) hack into the computers to find a rear entrance, b) bribe someone to get the codes you need, c) blow everything to bits and salvage the item out of the rubble, or d) go through the main entrance and sneak around to find the item.

Games like this will increase in popularity. While people often enjoy the increase in interactivity from movies to shooter games, many will prefer to increase interactivity even more. Eventually, video games may be a simulacrum of life.

Board games, on the other hand, will always hold popularity for those who prefer to avoid the violence and excitement of most video games. Also, certain traditional board games hold an elite status as thinking people's games--chess is a good example of this. We shall never lose chess, though we may create more complex versions of it.