The five greatest arguments in gaming – Reader’s Feature

A reader names the five evergreen topics he always loves arguing about in gaming, from piracy to backwards compatibility.

A lot of people enjoy gaming for the endless high-quality entertainment. Regardless of what system you play games on you can always be assured of a great line-up, with games that will give you memories that can last a lifetime. But gaming has also managed to produce quite a few controversial topics. Here are my favourites…

Emulation/backwards compatibility

My first experience with emulation was actually on the PC with Bleem. At the time, owning a PlayStation console and a low-end PC, I was always curious to know if it was actually possible to run PlayStation games on my PC. Many people might remember the controversy with Bleem and how this essentially brought emulation onto the scene in the late ‘90s. Emulation allows a separate system to simulate the inner workings of another system. It has become a great way to play games from formats from years ago that are not currently available, as well as from developers who are sadly no longer in business.

Even today new emulators are created by people, which has resulted in many games being able to be enjoyed that otherwise would not. Emulation is one subject that I have always enjoyed discussing and is one topic that won’t be going anywhere soon. Backwards compatibility also allows emulation to be used to allow previous generations of games to be enjoyed on newer systems.

Piracy

The one subject in gaming that is always assured to be future-proof is piracy. Piracy itself is the act of illegally copying a game without permission and has resulted in video gaming companies losing money. Piracy created a lot of uproar in the past, initially from the release of mod chips and jailbreak software for consoles, which were then quickly tackled by various corporations like Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony. This eventually saw the creation of more effective measures of prevention, such as DRM and always-online requirements for games.

Modding

Modding has always been portrayed in both a negative and positive light. A lot of developers do not seem to allow modding of games, while some developers do allow it. One great advantage that modding brings to a game is that it allows the end user to make improvements or additions to the game, such as user-created maps, missions, weapons, vehicles, and characters. However, this also can bring problems such as cheating in online games, as well as questionable modifications. It also can bring various problems such as copyright issues.

However, a lot of modding has demonstrated that games can become more than they were intended to be. For example, GTA Myrid Islands demonstrates how modding can be done right and shows the creativity a community can bring to a game. The first game I ever modded was GTA 2, where I added a bus and placed a siren on the top of it. The mod would work but would also crash at random.

Cheating

This is one subject that has always been seen as an absolute no-no for players and was at one time considered a shameful thing to do. However, this slowly began to change when cheats were shown to allow those struggling to complete a game to be able to do so. A few games can be enjoyed more with cheats, such as open world offline games like GTA single-player and allow the player to do things like restore health, spawn vehicles, and activate certain effects. Cheating will always be controversial to players but will also be a great way to have fun with a game when you get bored of certain restrictions.

Glitches, bugs, and exploits

Glitches are when a game will do something that it normally wouldn’t, such as place you outside of a map which allows you to explore the outside of a level and see things such as unused content. Bugs can also cause a game to fail to progress the gamer or allow you to defeat a boss which would refuse to die. Exploits in games have allowed people to avoid losing or be able to score more points than they should. There are also many other examples of games doing stuff that they shouldn’t, which is what I feel will make this a future-proof subject.

These are my five favourite controversial subjects in video gaming and what I feel will remain future-proof for many more generations to come.

By reader gaz be rotten (gamertag)

The reader’s feature does not necessary represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.