Scenario: Gaming Depression
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The fourth quarter of 2012 would signal the beginning of the end for video games. Realizing that people would rather surf the Internet, watch reality television, and play emulator games instead of spending money on their games, all the video game companies started to lose money quicker than in the North American video game crash of 1983.
Effects
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This would be entitled the Gaming Depression (also known as the Video Game Crash of 2012 to the hardcore gamers who were born prior to 1983). Nintendo will become a home appliance company becoming very popular by former hardcore gamers. Sega would start making slot machines and divert their gaming to the adult casino world. Sony would divert their game making staff back into making new TVs and Blu-Ray players (in addition to building indoor theme parks to compete with Sega's in Dubai). Microsoft would refocus all of their X-Box 360 releases into Windows 7 releases that would feel like mediocre console ports. Apple would eventually acquire the people who made Dance Dance Revolution and use their technology to get people to learn how to dance the traditional dances (and make them fun at the same time). Two years into the gaming depression, PC sales would skyrocket and the sales of netbooks would jump up considerably. Atari would start to create hybrid vehicles mainly for the American/Canadian market and Activision would start making educational materials for the K-12 schools.
In the year 2014, the Ethics Reform Act of 2014 will be one of the main factors of the gaming depression. The ESRB will be revamped and restrictions on the use of video game console take place, such as no online gaming or even gaming of any kind, even by the ones "rated E for Everyone" on Sunday-Thursday nights past 11:00 for people under 25. By the year 2015, video games are no longer mainstream - with its role being long replaced by world beat music, interactive anime, orgasm drugs and smoking water cigarettes for the post-rock generation. The teen pregnancy rate would skyrocket by 8000% as a result of former gamers becomes sex addicts and reckless womanizers. Being a "typical adolescent male" just would never be the same ever again. Only the freeware and unlicensed gaming communities continued to operate after December 22, 2012. Even they became scrutinzed deeply after the Ethics Reform Act of 2014 was signed into law.
Obesity rates would finally start seeing declining numbers after decades of increasing activity. The "Play 60" programs would finally be in full force as the increasingly lackluster quality of video games finally forces children to "unplug themselves from the consoles" and go outside to a world that is superior to the video games of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Parents will find a way to get children off the medication that they had to take in order to halt the bad medical conditions they developed while obese. They will result to Dr. Oz's naturopathic cures to eliminate their children's juvenile diabetes, high blood pressure, and osteoporisis without expensive pharamaceutical medications. Seriously, teens have been known to acquire brittle bones through drinking diet soda.
Economic pandemoniumEdit
The West Coast of North America will briefly be in a panic as laid-off game designers go through their unemployment insurance while they get re-trained to design business apps and educational software instead. Kids will learn to play baseball again and not through a PS2, PS3, or X-BOX 360 controller. Bird watching groups and bowling leagues would see an 120% increase in membership about 5-10 years after the Gaming Depression begins. Virginities will be lost almost overnight and the birth rate will see a slight rise for the next 20 years; delaying concerns about "lazy young people not wanting to have babies." Professional sports will have to find other venues to promote their superstars. People who want to emulate their sports idols will have to practice their game and hope to get drafted. It won't be like playing career/road to the show/dynasty mode on a video game. People will have to get out of the house and exercise with their friends. NASCAR saw the quality of their video games getting worse and pulled out of the EA Sports licensing game.
Perhaps Brian Z. France predicted the Gaming Depression three years before anyone else could. Maybe God was on his side after all. However, video gaming would make a comeback in the 2030s with virtual reality graphics, holographic screens and large-scale online games that allow players to colonize the entire universe on a 1:1 scale.
