Ooit was gamen voor de kneusje, nerds, kinderen en social outcasts en ik schaamde me daar niet voor. Nu jaren later is het gamen totaal ingeburgerd en worden de games ook steeds meer volwassen. Daarom heeft de website Cracked.com deze lijst met zes redenen gemaakt. Want wie kon ooit back in the day zien hoe we in de toekomst zouden multiplayeren.

#1. Online Multiplayer is a Godsend

I am not an online multiplayer gamer. At all. I hate it. I hate the mentality, I hate most of the other players and I almost always find the gameplay both confining and repetitive. I'll take story or atmosphere over mindless competition, every time.

But that's just because I'm old and bitter.

My 10-year-old self was all about multiplayer, whether it be the competitive gameplay of Street Fighter, or the hardcore, PTSD-inducing co-op of Contra. As adults, we're all bemoaning the fact that we don't play games in person anymore -- consoles don't even give us that option! But all I did back in the "golden age of multiplayer" was bemoan the fact that my friends came over to play games so rarely. Even as a child with a to-do list whose most intensive items were "practice jumpkicks" and "learn how to masturbate," it was almost impossible to get everybody in one place for a gaming session, and certainly not with any kind of regularity. Back in the so-called golden age, we were so desperate that we actually left the house to play video games with strangers in a dark room that smelled like Mountain Dew and feet.

I would hit up the 7-Eleven after school every day to routinely get my ass beat by the Asian kids (who were always there first. When is Asian school, you sons of bitches? Did the Koreans invent hover-bikes? Is there a goddamn wormhole behind the monkeybars that I don't know about?!) at Street Fighter II. And we didn't bond, or learn to respect other cultures, or build any character; we just silently hated each other while standing 6 inches apart, because this was the only way we could guarantee multiplayer gaming. And I did all of this despite owning the SNES version of SFII at home. I biked my chubby ass all the way to the convenience store, where I'd get yelled at by the constantly, inexplicably wet clerk, for the privilege of burning my allowance at the altar of the Asian pre-teen, despite having the same game for free in my living room, which was only like 10 feet from the box that dispensed free Hot Pockets.

Outside of childhood parties and your college dorm mates, you were seriously lucky to get the whole gang together for games once every few months. Now you can hop online, check your friends list and be in a game with somebody halfway across the world within 5 seconds. Any kid playing the newest version of Street Fighter will never, ever have to go without an opponent. As a gamer child, I would've killed for that ability. Literally. I would have butchered you without hesitation if it meant that your ghost would somehow be leashed to my SNES in the afterlife, doomed to play F-Zero with me on command.

And though I will say again and again that I despise online multiplayer, that's really only because I despise people in general. I can't stand the things. With their "wants" and "needs" and "opinions that aren't mine" -- quite frankly, it's disgusting. But that's not the fault of the game or the genre: Even I will play the hell out of online multiplayer if it's done right. Not to beat a dead whore, but let's revisit GTA IV. Aside from Team Fortress 2, that was the last game that really got me into online play, and that was because of one simple thing: Free Mode. What a brilliant, amazing move that was. Finally somebody paid attention to what we, as gamers, really wanted to do ... which was apparently "nothing special." I once spent a whole night with some friends on Free Mode, just screwing around. While they were experimenting with the swing launcher, or playing Car Tag in the streets, or just good old fashioned gunfighting, I spent the entire time stealing helicopters, carefully hovering directly over the other players, then bailing out and sending the machine plummeting down on top of them while screaming, "HELLO-COPTER!"

Sure, I lost some friends that night, but that may be the most fun I have ever had with a video game.

...

I'm not saying that all of our complaints are invalid or unwarranted. I'm just saying that we're all so busy bitching about what this hobby should be, and what it's not doing quite yet, that we rarely look back and see how astoundingly far it's come, and all the amazing things that it is right now. My wildest dreams as a child gamer have been exceeded a thousandfold -- I literally would not have believed you if you'd shown me Skyrim and told me that was only 20 years in the future of game development; I would have burned you as a time-witch (they were a serious problem back in the early '90s). And yet it seems that, whenever it's time to talk seriously about gaming, I invariably spend most of my time complaining.

And honestly? I'll probably be doing it again in a week or two, because I'm a fickle bastard with attention deficit disorder. But not this week. This week I'm setting the controller down for a minute, turning to my 10-year-old self, and asking in reverently hushed tones: "Did you see that shit?!"

...

And he will answer: "Yeah, that was badical!"

Because he's a fucking idiot.