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Video Games Are Boring

gamesindustry.biz

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Re: Video Games Are Boring

#201

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

COGlory wrote: post #38

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 scen…

>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.

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#202

Post by saint_fiasco »

guitarbill wrote: post #193
saint_fiasco wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author doesn't want more games for black males, or white women, or even minority women. Though the author may not realize it, that kind of demographics are a red herring. What she really is looking for is games for what she feels is an under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do. Her friends just happen to not be white males, s…

> under-served demographic: The kind of person who lives in "a state of constant shock, of constant stimulation" like her friends do Out of interest, what would such a game look like, to compete with such a state? Farmville? Candy Crush?

I don't feel over-stimulated, so I can only guess that such people would indeed prefer games like Farmville and Neko Atsume.

But the author's friend, in addition to being overwhelmed with constant shock and stimulation, is also a bit of a snob, so she won't play those low-brow games. I don't know what high-brow relaxing games are like. Maybe Papers, Please and Dear Esther?

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#203

Post by [deleted] »

arkitaip wrote: post #8

This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit playing them after a few hours or even minutes. Too much stress and surface experiences has had me looking in the other direction. Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and…

[deleted]

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#204

Post by noonespecial »

arkitaip wrote: post #8

This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit playing them after a few hours or even minutes. Too much stress and surface experiences has had me looking in the other direction. Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and…

Couldn't agree more. I still even get nostalgic about the "places" in the original Doom. Something about just hanging out there being amazed that my computer could even do that.

Damn I want my holo-deck. What's taking so long?

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#205

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

MrZongle2 wrote: post #160
dahart wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not sure I've ever heard of it, but I'll check it out. I played thousands upon thousands of hours of Quake 3 back in the day. Possibly my favorite game recently was FEZ. Journey, mentioned in the article, was beautiful. These days I'm as much a sucker for online Boggle or Sudoku as any console game.

FYI, Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-only roguelike, and the learning curve is as steep as the graphics are primitive. But the emergent gameplay is amazing. If the inconsistent UI or graphics give you pause, I'd suggest taking a look at Rimworld, currently in Early Access on Steam (or available directly from the developer's site). It has some of the deep qualities of DF but is a bit more forgiving.

DF isn't a rogulike. It has a roguelike in it, though.

DF is (primarily) a fortress management game, akin to something like SimCity. But with vastly more depth.

The first time you play DF, the game will generate a world. It will attempt realistic simulations of a variety of properties to try to create realistic landmasses, and randomly generate wars between random civilizations, create random historical figures, and generally wreak havoc on your CPU.

Then you embark with a party of Dwarfs (yes, dwarfs), and journey into the wilderness to start a new colony. Each of your dwarfs has specialties, a personality, opinions, and an incredibly complex body model, keeping track of everything from broken bones to strained tendons (I'm not exaggerating). But it goes further because everything else in the game is just as elaborately simulated, down to waterflow, the densities of various woods.

There is no win condition: Your fortress will collapse. The unofficial motto of the game is "losing is fun"

The game is still in alpha (0.42, meaning it's 42% feature complete), it's programmed by one guy, and the eventual goal is to simulate existance (or at least, the narratively interesting parts), and allow people to create their own stories. At least, better than it already is.

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#206

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

falcolas wrote: post #69

It's worth calling out - the author is at least partially using this piece to highlight the value of their own new game development studio. This colors a lot of the piece in a very different light. > At my studio we are making games with people who don't like video games because we want to break out of established paradigms. There are a lot of games out there, more than enough to fill any niche you could possibly wan…

Indeed: I wonder how many of those friends would have loved to play Fallen London, or Papers Please.

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#207

Post by edem »

Vaskivo wrote: post #80
edem wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep Minecraft was a good one but it lacks narrative. I do play Minecraft anyway but I would like to put more emphasis on the simulation.

Well, the minecraft I played had a chapter where a guy got overconfident and continued building during the night. He ended up having a creeper blow up and have a ton of skeletons invade his house. He had to escape, near death. It took him a week to take his house back. In the endhe mourned his dead pet pig, and erected a monument in his memory. :) Just because it doesn't have a "set in stone" story, that doen's mean…

Dwarf Fortress doesn't have a "set in stone" story either but there is a ton of emergent behavior which makes stories so fun that there is a whole community of players who are not playing the game but just reading the stories (myself included).

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#208

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

jplayer01 wrote: post #128
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #31

> She didn't like that there is a snake that can kill you. It's not that it is too hard, it's that she is deeply uninterested in being attacked in a game. I think this hints at a big part of the problem. When we frame something as a game, we tend to evoke the concepts of winning and losing. The most brutal and obvious (lazy?) way of implementing that is to turn it into "kill or be killed". And that brutal, obvious, v…

20 years of gaming here and honestly, the industry needs to get over its fetishization of violence and it's reliance on it as a crutch. Games can be so much more than mainstream gaming has allowed them to become.

OTOH, until NLP is a thing, social mechanics will always feel lacking. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try: there are plenty of interesting mechanics left unexplored.

Besides, sometimes you just want to shoot sombody with an absurd weapon.

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#209

Post by munchbunny »

advantark2 wrote: post #126
edblarney wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though I agree with what you say - I would say that the conventions of games are gender oriented. They are made by guys, for guys, and girls can play along. The 'mission orientation' - the 'guns/violence' - and 'sports' - while not exclusively a guy thing - they are definitely guy-leaning. Let me say it differently: if you took a totally random sample of girls and gave them each $100M to go off and build the 'best ga…

The idea that games are made for guys is in itself sexist, is it not? They're just games, and you're free to interpret them however you'd like.

Maybe it is? It's hard to say, because it depends on what kind of question you're asking.

Are you saying that the statement "games are made for guys" requires you to first believe that there are qualities of games that men inherently like more than women?

Or are you asking about an observational statement that games seem to be designed to target men as buyers by catering to traditionally male interests?

I think you could make a case that the implied belief in the first statement is itself sexist, but I don't think that's what the parent poster meant. We could probably have an interesting discussion on the subject, and I'd be curious if there is any rigorous research on the topic.

But I think the parent poster made the second observation, which can be true or false independent of any judgement of sexism.

Certain free-to-play MMORPG's with fantastically revealing female armors and very well endowed female characters are very clearly catering to a predominantly male audience. It doesn't take too much interpretation to call them sexist by the "I wouldn't want my daughter to grow up in a world that looked like that" standard. You can disagree with me on whether that actually constitutes "sexist," but I think we'd generally agree that those portrayals of women are problematic.

It's more subtle in most games, but I think there's still a point there about designing games for the existing hugely predominantly male gamer demographic.

Re: Video Games Are Boring

#210

Post by marcus_holmes »

emp_zealoth wrote: post #43
arkitaip wrote: post #8

This captures a lot of what I've been feeling lately. I can't stand most games, they just make me anxious and I will quit playing them after a few hours or even minutes. Too much stress and surface experiences has had me looking in the other direction. Take, for example, GTA 5. I've probably spent more hours riding cars and bikes in GTA5's beautiful countryside and outback than playing actual missions. Just hours and…

Simple - don't buy AAA (apart from very few select titles) because 99% of those is rehashed garbage and cliches Buy gamess from small studios, made by a few people or even one guy, usually a lot of them are in Steam Early Access (yes, it is risky, some of them get abandoned or just never improve much) For me this is like a reneissance in gaming. Have a look at Factorio, Starbound, Rimworld, Banished, Pillars of Etern…

I've been playing XCom2 a lot recently, and it occurred to me that I was caring waaay too much about my soldiers. Then it occurred to me that actually the part of the game I was enjoying most was looking after my soldiers.

I have a sniper that never hits anything, ever, and I've started having little pep talk with her before each mission, trying to get her to buck her game up and be a useful member of the team.

Shooting aliens in the head isn't the fun bit. Caring for my little gang of incompetents and nursing them through each mission is the fun bit.

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