Waarom spelen we video games?? Om verrast te worden met mooie verhalen en intense actie. Maar zo nu en dan maak je die momenten mee die je altijd bij zal blijven, de dood van Dom zijn vrouw in Gears of War 2 of het einde van Mass Effect 3 en dat door de grote teleurstelling. De website Cracked.com heeft nu dit artikel online gezet met zes momenten waar je games voor speelt, en dat is verdomd herkenbaar.

#6. When You Truly Feel Powerful for the First Time

I completely understand why, out of context, the sight of me giggling like a fool while blowing a bad guy into a pile of donor organs can feel as if you're watching the final erosion of human morality right before your eyes. But non-gamers never seem to understand that the blood-and-guts ultraviolence in video games is always either about A) goofy slapstick on the level of Wile E. Coyote getting run over by a steamroller or B) empowerment.

That's Fallout 3, and what you can't know until you've played one of these games is how hard they make you work to earn that. Games are empowerment fantasies, and when you start out in that particular universe, you are a refugee hiding underground in a shelter. Eventually you find a dinky little pistol that has like four bullets in it (in a universe full of bad guys who laugh off bullet wounds). In other games, you'll start out as a child with a wooden sword.

For hours you scurry around in fear, powerless. You die, you hide, you scrape for every little upgrade. And then, finally, you get the Game-Changing Weapon. Depending on the game, it might be a gun, or a spell, or a special ability. Whatever it is, it's laughably overpowered, beautiful to watch in action and incredibly satisfying when you unleash it on the same bad guys who tormented you in the early days.

This empowerment moment is fundamental to storytelling; it's Neo in The Matrix becoming "The One," it's Luke Skywalker becoming powerful enough to blow up the Death Star, it's "The Reward" in Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It's the hero embracing his destiny as the badass savior of mankind.

In shooting games, it's as simple as getting whatever weapon will let you obliterate a whole pile of enemies in one shot. The most famous is Doom's BFG 9000, which turns a hallway's worth of demons into something that can be scooped up with a snow shovel.