7 ms·

It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously

44 points by heyitswin 14y ago

freehunter 14y ago
I personally feel this may be taking the "games as art" discussion a bit too far. Yes, some games are art, and almost all games have artistic value. But when I'm playing Quake, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is that it's fun and it's challenging and I'm playing with my friends. Just like when I'm watching the latest summer blockbuster, I don't care that it won't win an Oscar, or that the girl in the plot is really just there to stand around and look pretty, or that the hero is somehow surviving things that no human could withstand. It's fun. I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.
- lubujackson 14y ago
  I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of artistic expression. You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman) I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.
  - JenniferFinelli 14y ago
    Couldn't have said it better! ^_^
- saraid216 14y ago
  You're not required to care. The average movie-goer is not required to be Roger Ebert, but Roger Ebert nevertheless tried to educate those who were interested in how to ask for better movies.
  - papsosouid 14y ago
    You are making the (quite appalling I think) assumption that "more artistic" means "better". Video games are not movies. There is far greater variety in video games, and far more reasons to enjoy them. I think people doing research on why human beings have "fun", what fun means and how we can provide more fun experiences are doing far more for the future of video games than people trying to pretend they are movies, and should aspire to be "art" movies.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      And some movies go into the category "pornographic" and are not supposed to do anything but turn you on.
fistofjohnwayne 14y ago
Once I started asking these questions while playing video games I became so frustrated that I stopped playing them.
- JenniferFinelli 14y ago
  Lol that's why they're intended for before or after, or during conversation with friends. ^_^ During is a bit over the top. I think if I tried writing a paper during Supersmash my husband might reconsider our gaming relationship. Although in Portal and Braid, the game's slow enough to allow for some thinking time... = P
dsschnau 14y ago
Yeah. I wish but this isn't going to happen.
lubujackson 14y ago
Nice to see a bit of discussion of thinking about games. This approach is very similar to how literacy is taught (at the high school level). Not just being able to read, but to understand complicated writing and its motivations/intent/effectiveness. There's obviously some tricky differences, though. For one, each experience of a game is personalized by the choices made. Games can produce very similar experiences ("on rails" games) or very different experiences (a bad example but: playing WoW as one race vs. another can be quite different early on).
rickdale 14y ago
Its time developers took gaming less seriously. When I was growing up every game had codes and one of the best parts of the nes/snes/sega era was game genie. I didn't even want a system without the game genie. Nowadays, developers don't want you bashing through their games. Some games like COD's will let you put in codes only after beating the campaign mode. Because every gamer is like, oh wow I beat that now let me do it with codes on...' The other thing I have found is like in Red Dead Redemption where you can use codes, but you cant save the game if you use them. I spend a crap load on games. Its come to the point now where I will check if a game has cheat codes before I purchase it. IMHO Assassin Creed 3, Far Cry 3, both super shitty games. And on top of being super shitty games the developers are wont let you control the world and insist you play the game the way it was intended. Developers taking games too serious is ruining video games. Its not suppose to be serious its a video game, at least thats what my friends tell me after I cuss them out for beating me in Fifa...
- minimaxir 14y ago
  The reason that developers are removing cheat codes is so that they can sell them to you via downloadable content or in-app purchase (such as nearly every EA game made in the last couple years). That's why game modding has been popular (and made super-easy due to Steam Workshop), but that's PC only.
- JenniferFinelli 14y ago
  I think a lot of people would agree with you on the developers with coding, but would argue that it's more of an issue of money versus art. "In the old days," they'd say, "artists earned basically nothing and did art because they cared about the art," or something like that. It's also a very Western phenomenon to make art closed-code. We think of "canon" StarWars or "canon" literature, but in Japanese literature, it was actually common practice for writers to "add on" to the works they liked the best. That work then became passed on to the next generation. There wasn't this idea of "canonicity." In the same way, some game developers are moving away from the idea of closed-code gaming--but we're talking indie games here. Minecraft is the best example ever. The download software actually includes folders for you to put in all your mods. And, in the end, that formula makes money. People like being able to add their creativity to your product, so why not let them? So fear not, my friend, not all developers are as tightfisted as those COD folks. And, even when they do, for the technologically savvy, where there's a will, there's always a way. = )
Dewie 14y ago
IMO if a game doesn't make me think about the characters and story after I'm done with the game, there wasn't much thoughtful art that would appeal to me there, anyway. Some games are straight up artistic expressions that go beyond trying to provide immediate fun in the here and now. For those, I naturally think about what happened in the game while and after I'm done with it. PS: Video Game Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?from=Main.VideoGames http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?f...
_pmf_ 14y ago
No.
burningion 14y ago
As far as mainstream gaming goes, the main focus has been in distraction and addiction, using very powerful psychological triggers. (Skinner boxes, variable ratio reinforcement, social pressure, etc.) If fact, these triggers have been deeply embedded in our social media too, turning both video games and social media into tools for manipulating our emotional selves into cycles of distraction and addiction. There's billion dollar industries being created and supported on manipulating the emotional parts of people's brains into using their products for distraction. So how the hell do we get back our ability to focus from these incredibly sophisticated distraction machines? I've been working the past year on measuring meditation using physical sensors. My research has resulted in releasing an app to measure and track the depth of mindfulness meditation using a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor. (http://www.buddhamindapp.com http://www.buddhamindapp.com) I see games incorporating physical sensors to see what's happening within us emotionally. With 9.5% of all kids between the ages of 4-17 diagnosed with ADD, we really need some new tools to fight back against the technology's creep into our minds. With the latest update pushed into the app store, we can now measure the depth of your mindfulness meditation in real time. (By using an algorithm to measure heart rate variability). Incorporated with this is a meditation quality score. We're working towards building a video game that teaches kids the ability to focus, and fights back against ADD. So what does this have to do with the quality of games? I think as the amount of information in our lives continues to explode, the two main problems for us will be keeping the noise and crap out, and filtering what we let in. So those shooters will enter our dreams, we'll dream in their worlds. But what are they doing for us? The next breakthrough in gaming is going to be in helping us manage and explore our minds, to live more optimal lives. It won't be enslaving us emotionally with achievements and unlocks. At least, I hope not.
- burningion 14y ago
  And to go further, I see games which are already doing this in a positive way. Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.
  - Lewisham 14y ago
xradionut 14y ago
As a productive adult I spend most of my time seriously. What little recreation time I have, I choose to enjoy how I please, serious or not. You can be a completionist in a RPG and finish quests while admiring the graphics and music or you can spending a evening slaying giants, goats, and elk with ice spears.
ebbv 14y ago
This article is kind of all over the place. On the one hand it is making a sort of "All entertainment we experience affects who we are." argument which is so broad as to be meaningless -- change on what level? Watching one episode of Jeopardy doesn't change me in a meaningful way, watching Jeopardy every night for 10 years might. Then it transitions into "Here's a list of questions to help you appreciate games on a deeper level", which is to me, both wrongheaded and insulting. It's wrongheaded because who are you to say how people should enjoy games? People are different, unless someone is harming you, let them do what they want to do. Maybe someone spends all day as an academic educating graduate students about the deeper meaning of 19th century literature. At the end of the day maybe they're ready to just load up Team Fortress 2 and blow up some people with cartoony missiles. To me, telling people "this is how you should enjoy games" is much more condescending than a post saying "these are the games you should enjoy, and these other games are bad." It's moving beyond just matters of taste into telling people how to think and how to behave.
- JenniferFinelli 14y ago
  Hi, ebbv! I do want to point out that those are questions, not answers. No one is telling you how to enjoy games--the fundamental question is, is there a way to enjoy games that accesses the deeper human levels of our existence? No where in this article does it say "DAMN YOU FOR NOT FINDING DEEP MEANING IN TETRIS YOU FOOL." That, I agree with you, would be a little over the top. = P There's another, bigger question to consider: if video games affect your mind so profoundly, it's probably a good idea to think a little before playing. I don't want to rephrase the article to say "think before buying," because that's an obvious part of anything we do--but if your pre-motor cortex actually replicates and primes your motor cortex to perform the Scout's baseball-bashing of Team Fortress 2, don't you at least want to consciously decide on what level it affects you? If you make the conscious decision to transfer TF2 only to area MT--which is essentially what you're arguing--then that decision should be conscious. Rather than just experiencing, isn't it legitimate to consider what your pre-motor cortex is acting out? Is it unreasonable to ask that we be consciencious about the workings of our minds during games? This isn't to say that EVERY SINGLE TIME you play a game you should write a paper and submit it to a game magazine. I would rather you didn't do that, because I would like to do that, and you would be competing, and, yannow, capitalism. This is just to say that it's reasonable to become aware of WHICH areas of your brain are affected--because whether you like it or not, your brain ACTIVELY practices killing. I'm not putting a moral label on that. I personally believe that's a good thing sometimes. I'm saying "Know thyself, brain-flesh-meatbag, and have fun playing." So have fun. BTW, who's your favorite TF2 character? I am pretty much in love with the Scout.
gmu3 14y ago
The author seems to believe we should adopt a literacy about games very similar to one used when evaluating literature. I think this is incredibly misguided, because they're entirely different mediums (or at least should be). In Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, he compares video games to word problems, and says video games like word problems should be judged by their cognitive challenges not their literary merit. If you want to evaluate games seriously by looking through a narrative lens, I don't think video games could ever surpass books in their ability to tell a story. The ability to control an avatar "normally makes a coherent interpretation of the avatar and his / her behavior in regard to the game’s story quite difficult, if not impossible. Players usually don’t enact an ideal story – at least not in the first playthrough. Take James Bond games, for example. While you learn how to be as cool, cunning and competent as James Bond, you normally act like an idiot. Not taking cover when being shot at, forgetting to reload, getting lost, driving against water hydrants and being killed – all of this is far from an ideal realization of the James Bond character (Well Played 1.0 (don't recommend))." Perhaps the argument could be made that video games give the player agency in the story in a way books don't so can excel narratively where books can't, but first of all how many games with a narrative focus really give the player any meaningful agency? And if I have meaningful agency, I'm writing my own story; I don't need to think deeply about what the author/designer is saying like this article advocates. This essay isn't short, but I think he makes a lot of good points about the history of the Zelda franchise and argues the next Zelda would be better if it had no story: http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ . Video games can have value and meaning that transcends narrative structures.
- JenniferFinelli 14y ago
  Hmm, that's a very interesting thought! It made me think: do you think judging literary vs. cognitive challenges could depend on the genre of the game? I would be pretty sad if Portal, for example, was judged only as a puzzle game. That was the idea that turned me off originally when someone described it to me. As soon as I got the story, though, I became interested, because I like to analyze. Could it be possible that some games should be judged primarily by cognitive challenges, and others by both? Or, could it be possible that we don't need to judge games at all? o_O Sounds weird, but this is what I mean. I'm actually in the article never once talking about evaluating the merit of a game on an objective level. It's not about judging games so much as judging how we interact with them. I'm talking about on a personal level, how the game interacts with you, and whether you find value out of it. If you find value only through area MT, that's a thing, I guess. But what if we find other ways of connecting our brains to a game--since the game is affecting those other areas already? On some level, who really cares about the "literary" or "cognitive" value of the game? On some level, you and I don't really give a velociraptor's feathers either way what some arbitrary standard says about a game. We care about how the game affects us. What do you think? I dunno, you're very societally-minded here, and that takes the article beyond what I'd originally intended. Neat! I'm not sure how we should "judge games," I guess! Just interested in how it gets my brain. ^_^
johngalt 14y ago
This reminds me of a conversation I had about "Hunger Games". My friend mentioned how implausible it was that people in the future would want to watch people fight to the death for entertainment. To which I responded 'What do you think we are doing now? We are watching a movie about people fighting to the death for our entertainment.'
klrr 14y ago
I play either to be entertained(maintstream games are good at this) or to feed my need of being competitive(Quake and such games are good at this). All people don't play games for their artistic value, although many games have a highly artistic value.
anywherenotes 14y ago
People play for very different reasons. People play to waste time, to socialize, to take their mind off things, to role play, to test their skills, to play a role outside their normal role, to practice English (or whatever their guild is speaking), to feel needed (in social games), to feel reckless (driving car and spinning out of control with no consequences). I probably left out hundreds of other reasons people play video games. Telling this diverse group of people 'this is how you should play' isn't productive. You can target one of their goals - lets say the group that wants to socialize, and say 'make sure your guildies are fun loving people, not a boring bunch'. Or if the article is targeting role players - make sure the game is meaningful in some way. But simply saying "What’s the underlying message or moral with this game" to a group of people that may just be using the game to play hit-man, isn't very productive.
simonsarris 14y ago
Inside this article is a shorter, more positive, more encouraging and less derogatory article struggling to get out. "Wonderful ways to think about the games we play" would be a great article. I want to like this article, but it took too many mean turns. It's not considerate of all the reasons we play games. As John McCarthy (AI, Lisp) used to say: "Hard distinctions make bad philosophy."
Garoof 14y ago
Usually when someone writes a piece on taking gaming seriously, I get the impression that the author does not take gaming very seriously, finds some other issues to be pretty serious, and thinks that to take gaming seriously is a matter of relating it to those issues. Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more seriously.

44 points by heyitswin 14y ago

I personally feel this may be taking the "games as art" discussion a bit too far. Yes, some games are art, and almost all games have artistic value. But when I'm playing Quake, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is that it's fun and it's challenging and I'm playing with my friends. Just like when I'm watching the latest summer blockbuster, I don't care that it won't win an Oscar, or that the girl in the plot is really just there to stand around and look pretty, or that the hero is somehow surviving things that no human could withstand. It's fun. I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.

lubujackson 14y ago
I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of artistic expression. You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman) I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.
- JenniferFinelli 14y ago
  Couldn't have said it better! ^_^
saraid216 14y ago
You're not required to care. The average movie-goer is not required to be Roger Ebert, but Roger Ebert nevertheless tried to educate those who were interested in how to ask for better movies.
- papsosouid 14y ago
  You are making the (quite appalling I think) assumption that "more artistic" means "better". Video games are not movies. There is far greater variety in video games, and far more reasons to enjoy them. I think people doing research on why human beings have "fun", what fun means and how we can provide more fun experiences are doing far more for the future of video games than people trying to pretend they are movies, and should aspire to be "art" movies.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    And some movies go into the category "pornographic" and are not supposed to do anything but turn you on.

fistofjohnwayne 14y ago

Once I started asking these questions while playing video games I became so frustrated that I stopped playing them.

JenniferFinelli 14y ago
Lol that's why they're intended for before or after, or during conversation with friends. ^_^ During is a bit over the top. I think if I tried writing a paper during Supersmash my husband might reconsider our gaming relationship. Although in Portal and Braid, the game's slow enough to allow for some thinking time... = P

dsschnau 14y ago

Yeah. I wish but this isn't going to happen.

lubujackson 14y ago

Nice to see a bit of discussion of thinking about games. This approach is very similar to how literacy is taught (at the high school level). Not just being able to read, but to understand complicated writing and its motivations/intent/effectiveness. There's obviously some tricky differences, though. For one, each experience of a game is personalized by the choices made. Games can produce very similar experiences ("on rails" games) or very different experiences (a bad example but: playing WoW as one race vs. another can be quite different early on).

rickdale 14y ago

Its time developers took gaming less seriously. When I was growing up every game had codes and one of the best parts of the nes/snes/sega era was game genie. I didn't even want a system without the game genie. Nowadays, developers don't want you bashing through their games. Some games like COD's will let you put in codes only after beating the campaign mode. Because every gamer is like, oh wow I beat that now let me do it with codes on...' The other thing I have found is like in Red Dead Redemption where you can use codes, but you cant save the game if you use them. I spend a crap load on games. Its come to the point now where I will check if a game has cheat codes before I purchase it. IMHO Assassin Creed 3, Far Cry 3, both super shitty games. And on top of being super shitty games the developers are wont let you control the world and insist you play the game the way it was intended. Developers taking games too serious is ruining video games. Its not suppose to be serious its a video game, at least thats what my friends tell me after I cuss them out for beating me in Fifa...

minimaxir 14y ago
The reason that developers are removing cheat codes is so that they can sell them to you via downloadable content or in-app purchase (such as nearly every EA game made in the last couple years). That's why game modding has been popular (and made super-easy due to Steam Workshop), but that's PC only.
JenniferFinelli 14y ago
I think a lot of people would agree with you on the developers with coding, but would argue that it's more of an issue of money versus art. "In the old days," they'd say, "artists earned basically nothing and did art because they cared about the art," or something like that. It's also a very Western phenomenon to make art closed-code. We think of "canon" StarWars or "canon" literature, but in Japanese literature, it was actually common practice for writers to "add on" to the works they liked the best. That work then became passed on to the next generation. There wasn't this idea of "canonicity." In the same way, some game developers are moving away from the idea of closed-code gaming--but we're talking indie games here. Minecraft is the best example ever. The download software actually includes folders for you to put in all your mods. And, in the end, that formula makes money. People like being able to add their creativity to your product, so why not let them? So fear not, my friend, not all developers are as tightfisted as those COD folks. And, even when they do, for the technologically savvy, where there's a will, there's always a way. = )

Dewie 14y ago

IMO if a game doesn't make me think about the characters and story after I'm done with the game, there wasn't much thoughtful art that would appeal to me there, anyway. Some games are straight up artistic expressions that go beyond trying to provide immediate fun in the here and now. For those, I naturally think about what happened in the game while and after I'm done with it. PS: Video Game Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?from=Main.VideoGames http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?f...

_pmf_ 14y ago

No.

burningion 14y ago

As far as mainstream gaming goes, the main focus has been in distraction and addiction, using very powerful psychological triggers. (Skinner boxes, variable ratio reinforcement, social pressure, etc.) If fact, these triggers have been deeply embedded in our social media too, turning both video games and social media into tools for manipulating our emotional selves into cycles of distraction and addiction. There's billion dollar industries being created and supported on manipulating the emotional parts of people's brains into using their products for distraction. So how the hell do we get back our ability to focus from these incredibly sophisticated distraction machines? I've been working the past year on measuring meditation using physical sensors. My research has resulted in releasing an app to measure and track the depth of mindfulness meditation using a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor. (http://www.buddhamindapp.com http://www.buddhamindapp.com) I see games incorporating physical sensors to see what's happening within us emotionally. With 9.5% of all kids between the ages of 4-17 diagnosed with ADD, we really need some new tools to fight back against the technology's creep into our minds. With the latest update pushed into the app store, we can now measure the depth of your mindfulness meditation in real time. (By using an algorithm to measure heart rate variability). Incorporated with this is a meditation quality score. We're working towards building a video game that teaches kids the ability to focus, and fights back against ADD. So what does this have to do with the quality of games? I think as the amount of information in our lives continues to explode, the two main problems for us will be keeping the noise and crap out, and filtering what we let in. So those shooters will enter our dreams, we'll dream in their worlds. But what are they doing for us? The next breakthrough in gaming is going to be in helping us manage and explore our minds, to live more optimal lives. It won't be enslaving us emotionally with achievements and unlocks. At least, I hope not.

burningion 14y ago
And to go further, I see games which are already doing this in a positive way. Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.
- Lewisham 14y ago

xradionut 14y ago

As a productive adult I spend most of my time seriously. What little recreation time I have, I choose to enjoy how I please, serious or not. You can be a completionist in a RPG and finish quests while admiring the graphics and music or you can spending a evening slaying giants, goats, and elk with ice spears.

ebbv 14y ago

This article is kind of all over the place. On the one hand it is making a sort of "All entertainment we experience affects who we are." argument which is so broad as to be meaningless -- change on what level? Watching one episode of Jeopardy doesn't change me in a meaningful way, watching Jeopardy every night for 10 years might. Then it transitions into "Here's a list of questions to help you appreciate games on a deeper level", which is to me, both wrongheaded and insulting. It's wrongheaded because who are you to say how people should enjoy games? People are different, unless someone is harming you, let them do what they want to do. Maybe someone spends all day as an academic educating graduate students about the deeper meaning of 19th century literature. At the end of the day maybe they're ready to just load up Team Fortress 2 and blow up some people with cartoony missiles. To me, telling people "this is how you should enjoy games" is much more condescending than a post saying "these are the games you should enjoy, and these other games are bad." It's moving beyond just matters of taste into telling people how to think and how to behave.

JenniferFinelli 14y ago
Hi, ebbv! I do want to point out that those are questions, not answers. No one is telling you how to enjoy games--the fundamental question is, is there a way to enjoy games that accesses the deeper human levels of our existence? No where in this article does it say "DAMN YOU FOR NOT FINDING DEEP MEANING IN TETRIS YOU FOOL." That, I agree with you, would be a little over the top. = P There's another, bigger question to consider: if video games affect your mind so profoundly, it's probably a good idea to think a little before playing. I don't want to rephrase the article to say "think before buying," because that's an obvious part of anything we do--but if your pre-motor cortex actually replicates and primes your motor cortex to perform the Scout's baseball-bashing of Team Fortress 2, don't you at least want to consciously decide on what level it affects you? If you make the conscious decision to transfer TF2 only to area MT--which is essentially what you're arguing--then that decision should be conscious. Rather than just experiencing, isn't it legitimate to consider what your pre-motor cortex is acting out? Is it unreasonable to ask that we be consciencious about the workings of our minds during games? This isn't to say that EVERY SINGLE TIME you play a game you should write a paper and submit it to a game magazine. I would rather you didn't do that, because I would like to do that, and you would be competing, and, yannow, capitalism. This is just to say that it's reasonable to become aware of WHICH areas of your brain are affected--because whether you like it or not, your brain ACTIVELY practices killing. I'm not putting a moral label on that. I personally believe that's a good thing sometimes. I'm saying "Know thyself, brain-flesh-meatbag, and have fun playing." So have fun. BTW, who's your favorite TF2 character? I am pretty much in love with the Scout.

gmu3 14y ago

The author seems to believe we should adopt a literacy about games very similar to one used when evaluating literature. I think this is incredibly misguided, because they're entirely different mediums (or at least should be). In Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, he compares video games to word problems, and says video games like word problems should be judged by their cognitive challenges not their literary merit. If you want to evaluate games seriously by looking through a narrative lens, I don't think video games could ever surpass books in their ability to tell a story. The ability to control an avatar "normally makes a coherent interpretation of the avatar and his / her behavior in regard to the game’s story quite difficult, if not impossible. Players usually don’t enact an ideal story – at least not in the first playthrough. Take James Bond games, for example. While you learn how to be as cool, cunning and competent as James Bond, you normally act like an idiot. Not taking cover when being shot at, forgetting to reload, getting lost, driving against water hydrants and being killed – all of this is far from an ideal realization of the James Bond character (Well Played 1.0 (don't recommend))." Perhaps the argument could be made that video games give the player agency in the story in a way books don't so can excel narratively where books can't, but first of all how many games with a narrative focus really give the player any meaningful agency? And if I have meaningful agency, I'm writing my own story; I don't need to think deeply about what the author/designer is saying like this article advocates. This essay isn't short, but I think he makes a lot of good points about the history of the Zelda franchise and argues the next Zelda would be better if it had no story: http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ . Video games can have value and meaning that transcends narrative structures.

JenniferFinelli 14y ago
Hmm, that's a very interesting thought! It made me think: do you think judging literary vs. cognitive challenges could depend on the genre of the game? I would be pretty sad if Portal, for example, was judged only as a puzzle game. That was the idea that turned me off originally when someone described it to me. As soon as I got the story, though, I became interested, because I like to analyze. Could it be possible that some games should be judged primarily by cognitive challenges, and others by both? Or, could it be possible that we don't need to judge games at all? o_O Sounds weird, but this is what I mean. I'm actually in the article never once talking about evaluating the merit of a game on an objective level. It's not about judging games so much as judging how we interact with them. I'm talking about on a personal level, how the game interacts with you, and whether you find value out of it. If you find value only through area MT, that's a thing, I guess. But what if we find other ways of connecting our brains to a game--since the game is affecting those other areas already? On some level, who really cares about the "literary" or "cognitive" value of the game? On some level, you and I don't really give a velociraptor's feathers either way what some arbitrary standard says about a game. We care about how the game affects us. What do you think? I dunno, you're very societally-minded here, and that takes the article beyond what I'd originally intended. Neat! I'm not sure how we should "judge games," I guess! Just interested in how it gets my brain. ^_^

johngalt 14y ago

This reminds me of a conversation I had about "Hunger Games". My friend mentioned how implausible it was that people in the future would want to watch people fight to the death for entertainment. To which I responded 'What do you think we are doing now? We are watching a movie about people fighting to the death for our entertainment.'

klrr 14y ago

I play either to be entertained(maintstream games are good at this) or to feed my need of being competitive(Quake and such games are good at this). All people don't play games for their artistic value, although many games have a highly artistic value.

anywherenotes 14y ago

People play for very different reasons. People play to waste time, to socialize, to take their mind off things, to role play, to test their skills, to play a role outside their normal role, to practice English (or whatever their guild is speaking), to feel needed (in social games), to feel reckless (driving car and spinning out of control with no consequences). I probably left out hundreds of other reasons people play video games. Telling this diverse group of people 'this is how you should play' isn't productive. You can target one of their goals - lets say the group that wants to socialize, and say 'make sure your guildies are fun loving people, not a boring bunch'. Or if the article is targeting role players - make sure the game is meaningful in some way. But simply saying "What’s the underlying message or moral with this game" to a group of people that may just be using the game to play hit-man, isn't very productive.

simonsarris 14y ago

Inside this article is a shorter, more positive, more encouraging and less derogatory article struggling to get out. "Wonderful ways to think about the games we play" would be a great article. I want to like this article, but it took too many mean turns. It's not considerate of all the reasons we play games. As John McCarthy (AI, Lisp) used to say: "Hard distinctions make bad philosophy."

Garoof 14y ago

Usually when someone writes a piece on taking gaming seriously, I get the impression that the author does not take gaming very seriously, finds some other issues to be pretty serious, and thinks that to take gaming seriously is a matter of relating it to those issues. Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more seriously.