As the Electronic Entertainment Expo comes and goes, there is one thing that continues to rain supreme. We all feel the need to tare this down and that down, yet we seem to have forgotten why we fell in love with this damned medium in the first place. Jumping to the defense of videogames is easy, but what does that matter when we are taking videogames down from within?

Are you apart of the club? That’s the question we play back to ourselves when we meet someone new and we haven’t determined if they are “down” with the thought of a videogame. Sure, chances are if you are reading this you’ve had a large number of years to gain videogame retention. Casual gamers just don’t possess videogame retention, yet they can navigate menus of other devices like there mobile phone or a programming guide on a television. Bring that same familiar interface to them in the form of a game and eye’s immediately start to glaze over in terror. So, why is that? Is it because it’s human nature to fear what we do not know or is that we fear what we are told we shouldn’t know from society? Yet, its (videogames) in many ways the same as that aforementioned mobile phone and television.

We can push buttons with ease when it comes to one activity and regress back to cavemen as soon as we feel out of place. So, what does this have to do with why we play videogames? It’s simple right? We’ve all become jaded. Never has it become all so obvious as reaction to the E3 Microsoft Media Briefing proliferated across the internet.

As the podcast junkie that I am, I’ve heard lots of impressions of what was seen and/or shown at this years E3 from other outlets.  No matter what was on display it was destined to get a meager response of “meh”. Sure there was some praise here and there yet overall it appears that seasoned gamers first, press second, they are forgetting that the larger audience out there isn’t looking for you to heap praise on anything nor act subdued at all times to avoid being accused of being a fanboy. They are looking for you to relay information. Let them decide how interested they are.

And while some of this may be inside baseball that should only be talked about amongst those on the inside, its time we access why we play videogames? Not a question for those who jump in and out of the medium at infrequent times, but a question for those who’ve been entrenched in videogames to the point of it becoming a lifestyle.

There’s more to come, so stay tuned….