4 ms·

I mostly disagree with this article. There's very few nonviolent games I've played that I enjoy. I guess you could say I'm the average consumer, but there are c

by COGlory 10y ago

I mostly disagree with this article. There's very few nonviolent games I've played that I enjoy. I guess you could say I'm the average consumer, but there are certain trends in industries that are predominant, because that's what people want. I think all media generally has its worth defined by how it is a conduit of unrealistic experience. For instance, the biggest blockbuster movies usually contain unrealistic scenarios of violence and heroism. The biggest romance movies are usually unrealistic. The most popular music is usually describing a hypothetical situation that people feel drawn to. I think that's responsible for the trends we've seen in graphics, 3d, virtual reality. People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. The more realistic graphics become, the more they feel that their experiences in media are real experiences. So my point is basically that games exist not just for the novelty of playing a game, but also to let people live their fantasies, and some fantasies are less realistic than others, and therefore will be better represented in games. Anyone can have a relationship with another person. You don't need Lydia in Skyrim for that, and likely if you try it in real life, it'll be much more rewarding than in a video game. If you try gutting someone with a sword in real life, you'll go to jail. This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles, for the same reason most people don't spend hours in art museums ever day. They're not interested in media for its own sake as artistic, they're interested in the proxy experiences that it offers, that people can't get elsewhere.

panglott 10y ago
People have very different fantasy lives. Some people have fantasy lives that revolve around social relationships. Others have fantasy lives that revolve around power-tripping and murder-hoboing. But I suspect that the former are actually much more common than the latter. It's a fantasy life because it is not actually reality! I always wondered why people play Guitar Hero when they could just practice the guitar instead. But playing the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work, a huge investment of time. Social relationships are hard, too, and if you screw them up it can wreck your life. Establishing a social identity takes a lot of care. Who wouldn't want a fantasy social life to experiment with different identities and kinds of relationships? My point is that different people will enjoy different kinds of games, which is fine, and should be fun. This was an article about why the author's friends didn't enjoy many video games. And it's hard to use yourself as the yardstick of other people's preferences.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  I can't imagine realistic social gaming given today's technology. Relationships are complicated - much more complicated than game graphics. A system that accurately modelled human relationships would probably need to be within throwing distance of passing the Turing test. One reason the industry keeps churning through the same ideas is because they're relatively tractable. Graphics, physics, texturing etc, are all solvable bounded problems. It's easy to make trite multipath social games, but it's incredibly hard to make a social game with genuine depth. And realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world. Second Life was an interesting experiment. It started off as the great new hope for social gaming, and turned into a sterile strip mall and giant pimp hotel. It turns out that even if you give people free rein with their fantasies, most fantasies aren't all that original or interesting.
  - panglott 10y ago
    Lots of CRPGs understand that gamers want to explore different identities, and thus have strong character customization. But conflict in the game is often framed around violence and murder. It shouldn't surprise anyone that lots of people find violence and gore simply disturbing and don't want to engage it. In fact, that's what happened with the author's cousin and Skyrim: she was playing it obsessively until her "friend' died. What turned her off was not the limits of technology, but the game's violence. When I read that she didn't like "Journey" because the snake could kill her, I thought back to how much I hated some of the ridiculous cheap death at the beginning of one of the first games I played, the original "King's Quest III" here http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screenshot-003-1086x611.jpg http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screens... (which I presevered through, although it seems like she would not). And it's true that many of the women I know who occasionally play games like things like "The Secret of Monkey Island", which has puzzles and RPG elements but dying is impossible. "The Sims" is another game with a large female audience that focused on building and exploring social interactions and identities. And IRL you can't actually lock your kids in a closet, drown them, or set them on fire, like you can with digital dolls. Thinking in terms of board games, social games like Liar's Dice and Werewolf don't require good AI. Pandemic is a huge hit as a game without any social conflict at all, where the players are collaborating to solve puzzles (the game).
eswat 10y ago
> People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with. Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education. But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses). According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.
- hood_syntax 10y ago
  I love Jade Empire, I always wish they continued that series. Even a modern remake with an updated combat system would be welcome...
- dmichulke 10y ago
  +1 for Jade Empire
- AnOscelot 10y ago
  I wonder how many of us went the opposite direction. Loved games when I was a teen. Then college took up so much time that games fell to the wayside. And then almost the entirety of my 20s and much of my 30s was spent either working on projects I was passionate about, or with my friends and band, or on various adventures. Games took a far back seat to all of that. Something to do on one of those rare nights when nothing was planned. And now, with the demands of family and sick loved ones, and with the added money which can build the sort of system I could have only dreamed about in my poor teens and college years, I'm home much more and games are suddenly appealing again.
TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Games for gamers are a known quantity. The formula for mainstream games hasn't changed for decades. What if there's a huge untapped market for games that don't focus on war, combat, crime, apocalypse, and gore? Personally I'm more interested in exploring than in killing enemies. Put me in a shoot-em-up and I'll turn on god mode and play through to the end to experience the scenery and locations. The aliens/enemy forces/demons/monsters are mostly just a diverting distraction. I don't particularly want to have relationships with characters. But I do want to have novel experiences I can't have anywhere else. Mainstream games don't do that for me.
1_2__3 10y ago
I think you're giving far too much intellectual credit to what is basically just a feminist rant dressed up as concern trolling for the industry.
- bovermyer 10y ago
  A wild Privileged White Male IT Worker has appeared!
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
>This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles Nonsense. Games that try to do more than entertain, that actually try to use the medium to express a message, much in the way an art film might, are generally well recieved by the press and gamers alike for mixing up the formula and trying new things. For examples, look at games like Spec Ops: The Line (A vicious deconstruction of the FPS genre: do you feel like a hero yet?), Undertale, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, and Master Reboot.
- filereaper 10y ago
  Highly recommend Spec Ops: The Line, its usually on Steam for cheap and works on Linux!
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Ah, you've played it! Do you feel like a hero yet?

by COGlory 10y ago

panglott 10y ago

People have very different fantasy lives. Some people have fantasy lives that revolve around social relationships. Others have fantasy lives that revolve around power-tripping and murder-hoboing. But I suspect that the former are actually much more common than the latter. It's a fantasy life because it is not actually reality! I always wondered why people play Guitar Hero when they could just practice the guitar instead. But playing the guitar is hard and takes a lot of work, a huge investment of time. Social relationships are hard, too, and if you screw them up it can wreck your life. Establishing a social identity takes a lot of care. Who wouldn't want a fantasy social life to experiment with different identities and kinds of relationships? My point is that different people will enjoy different kinds of games, which is fine, and should be fun. This was an article about why the author's friends didn't enjoy many video games. And it's hard to use yourself as the yardstick of other people's preferences.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
I can't imagine realistic social gaming given today's technology. Relationships are complicated - much more complicated than game graphics. A system that accurately modelled human relationships would probably need to be within throwing distance of passing the Turing test. One reason the industry keeps churning through the same ideas is because they're relatively tractable. Graphics, physics, texturing etc, are all solvable bounded problems. It's easy to make trite multipath social games, but it's incredibly hard to make a social game with genuine depth. And realistically, if you do that you're not competing with other games, but with dating apps, job interviews, and the real social world. Second Life was an interesting experiment. It started off as the great new hope for social gaming, and turned into a sterile strip mall and giant pimp hotel. It turns out that even if you give people free rein with their fantasies, most fantasies aren't all that original or interesting.
- panglott 10y ago
  Lots of CRPGs understand that gamers want to explore different identities, and thus have strong character customization. But conflict in the game is often framed around violence and murder. It shouldn't surprise anyone that lots of people find violence and gore simply disturbing and don't want to engage it. In fact, that's what happened with the author's cousin and Skyrim: she was playing it obsessively until her "friend' died. What turned her off was not the limits of technology, but the game's violence. When I read that she didn't like "Journey" because the snake could kill her, I thought back to how much I hated some of the ridiculous cheap death at the beginning of one of the first games I played, the original "King's Quest III" here http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screenshot-003-1086x611.jpg http://icdn8.digitaltrends.com/image/kings-quest-iii-screens... (which I presevered through, although it seems like she would not). And it's true that many of the women I know who occasionally play games like things like "The Secret of Monkey Island", which has puzzles and RPG elements but dying is impossible. "The Sims" is another game with a large female audience that focused on building and exploring social interactions and identities. And IRL you can't actually lock your kids in a closet, drown them, or set them on fire, like you can with digital dolls. Thinking in terms of board games, social games like Liar's Dice and Werewolf don't require good AI. Pandemic is a huge hit as a game without any social conflict at all, where the players are collaborating to solve puzzles (the game).

eswat 10y ago

> People willing to consume media are people that don't have or want the opportunity to be extraordinary in their lives. That’s an interesting thought that I can’t disagree with. Myself and many people in my circle, including clients, have had played games in the past, probably to the point of unhealthy obsession when we were kids and getting an education. But all of us became less enchanted by the medium as we became more successful (success in terms of increasing our financial wealth, control of time and ability to experience or get what we desire in life). We just couldn’t justify the time to play the games that were coming out, which we believed were not sparking the same fire in us that games we played years ago had (possibly due to rose-tinted glasses). According to the article I guess I now seek games with more depth. Games that can impart some useful knowledge and help me reframe things in life, like a good book can. To use BioWare as an example, I believe their older RPGs like Jade Empire did this well, that struck a balance of philosophy, problem solving and interesting narrative. But this went away when they dove more into RPGs that dived deeper into the power fantasies that most consumers want.

hood_syntax 10y ago
I love Jade Empire, I always wish they continued that series. Even a modern remake with an updated combat system would be welcome...
dmichulke 10y ago
+1 for Jade Empire
AnOscelot 10y ago
I wonder how many of us went the opposite direction. Loved games when I was a teen. Then college took up so much time that games fell to the wayside. And then almost the entirety of my 20s and much of my 30s was spent either working on projects I was passionate about, or with my friends and band, or on various adventures. Games took a far back seat to all of that. Something to do on one of those rare nights when nothing was planned. And now, with the demands of family and sick loved ones, and with the added money which can build the sort of system I could have only dreamed about in my poor teens and college years, I'm home much more and games are suddenly appealing again.

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago

Games for gamers are a known quantity. The formula for mainstream games hasn't changed for decades. What if there's a huge untapped market for games that don't focus on war, combat, crime, apocalypse, and gore? Personally I'm more interested in exploring than in killing enemies. Put me in a shoot-em-up and I'll turn on god mode and play through to the end to experience the scenery and locations. The aliens/enemy forces/demons/monsters are mostly just a diverting distraction. I don't particularly want to have relationships with characters. But I do want to have novel experiences I can't have anywhere else. Mainstream games don't do that for me.

1_2__3 10y ago

I think you're giving far too much intellectual credit to what is basically just a feminist rant dressed up as concern trolling for the industry.

bovermyer 10y ago
A wild Privileged White Male IT Worker has appeared!

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

>This whole portrayal of video games (and other media) as "art" will never take off outside of technological hipster circles Nonsense. Games that try to do more than entertain, that actually try to use the medium to express a message, much in the way an art film might, are generally well recieved by the press and gamers alike for mixing up the formula and trying new things. For examples, look at games like Spec Ops: The Line (A vicious deconstruction of the FPS genre: do you feel like a hero yet?), Undertale, Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, and Master Reboot.

filereaper 10y ago
Highly recommend Spec Ops: The Line, its usually on Steam for cheap and works on Linux!
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  Ah, you've played it! Do you feel like a hero yet?