You've been asked to explain videogames to someone who has never heard of them - perhaps an elderly relative, or an alien, or someone who gets out too much. Whatever. The thing is, you can only select three titles to illustrate your lesson. What do you chose?
I don't mean the three 'best' videogames. You need to broadly define what videogames are and the types of experience they offer. Your choices need to encapsulate the whole industry.
Go on, give it a go.
Here are mine...
GTA: San Andreas Packs a lot of genre activity into one handy game. Shooting, exploring, mission-based and free-roaming elements, a bit of driving. Its nihilistic approach to life seems to sum up a lot of what videogames are about.
Tetris To show the abstract side of videogaming - the fact that games do not always require a setting or a narrative, that they can work on an entirely logical level.
SingStar: Eighties A completely different type of experience, in which the gamer becomes the centre of attention rather than the screen, and the game itself is just there as a tool - a part of a night in with friends.
