Pure Imagination

'Come with me,and you'll see, a land of pure imagination...'

I love this song, one of the best parts of the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and sung awesomely by Gene Wilder. The remake is good, but I was saddened by it's being excised from the movie. Johnny Depp would have nailed it. Oh well.

One of the reasons I love playing video games is not just the chance to blow someone's head off with a shotgun without actually killing anyone, it is a chance to see the remarkable worlds and creatures created by some incredibly talented people. There is and will be for the forseeable future a debate on whether video games are art or not; I stand firmly in the 'games are art.' section.

I have seen incedible worlds on the television screen that I have only seen in my dreams, and better still, I can interact with these worlds. It is an incredible feeling, one I am sure a lot of other gamers have felt that way. I will not mention any particular games in this blog; I know what they are, and you know what they are.

Gaming is not all about violence and death, although right now that is a big part of the gaming landscape. Gaming is about unleashing the imagination, for the creators and for the players. Since I was a child, I have wanted to be a comic book writer and/or illustrator. That is a dream I still have but will probably never realize for a multitude of reasons. But now there are videogames, which are each generation creating more realistic but breath-taking worlds. This is also happening in movies, which I think is wonderful, through the use of Computer Generated Images. Now the dreamakers can put their dreams up on the big screen, so we can wonder at them.

In videogames we can go one better, though. We can take part in and explore the dreams and imaginations of others. And in so doing, be inspired ourselves. We can play in a land made only of confections, in land full of dragons and demons, on a world far, far away. It is a good time be a videogame player.

So come with me, to a land of pure imagination...because we can.

And thanks to all the once and future creators of video games, because not only are they the dreamers of dreams, they are the the makers of dreams.