Video games as an aspect of Visual Culture

Are video games an aspect of Visual Culture studies? Definitely yes, but not only because Wikipedia says so.

Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash

In the former years the video games constituted interactive sequences of images that were consumed by players, with a relatively low level of complexity in terms of user experience and user engagement. The very first game platforms offered straight forward gameplay including a controller with very few buttons as a physical interface. The multiplayer mode introduced a more sophisticated engagement involving two players, two physical interfaces as input peripherals and a single display. The pixels on the screen might had been very few in the very beginning, and might have been increasing later on indeed, but did have strong impact on this primitive game experience.
In the latter years, the game experience has been advanced into a more sophisticated complex of multiple mediums. The gamer nowadays consumes real time visual information from multiple communication channels including the display of the game platform, of the gamepad or of any other mobile game platform, the mobile phone, the personal computer, the audio speakers and the headphones in parallel. All these interfaces allow the gamer to play through predefined scenarios in standalone mode or be involved in multiplayer game experience and interact with other gamers in virtual environments.
The visual part of this communication is probably the most important — but not the only — component of the overall term of visual experience. The sound, the vibration of the controller and the emotions that are generated and formed as physical reactions are part of this interaction as well. The video games offer the gameplay as a tool in order to enrich the sensation of pleasure and the meaning in the term of visual experience.