TLDR: The author has a cousin who doesn't like video game violence and white males ruin everything.
Indeed, it's an example of the kind of blinkered identity politics that is infecting so many minds, industries and institutions.
Video Games Are Boring
291–300 of 342 posts
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#292This 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…
Rimworld is so good. At the same time, no game has made me ragequit more intensely in a very long time. Broken thoughts right when you need the colonists to buckle down...
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly how it is for me too. When I was younger I would feel so connected to the game world, and the wonders of exploring the game world were real wonders to me. Discovering some new village in Ultima 6 made me feel like a great adventurer. A finder of something. If it was important in the game world then it was important. These days it falls out just like you wrote: if I try to play a game, I mess around fo…
> Discovering some new village in Ultima 6 made me feel like a great adventurer. I find that joy of discovery varies wildly game to game. I could never get into Bethesda RPGs, new or old. There is lots to discover in an Elder Scrolls game, but none of it feels like it has much weight or import. When the Ultima games really hit their stride (V through VII p2), discoveries had weight and import. The Witcher games feel…
It's about depth. The world of Witcher 3 might as well be an actual world, with its utterly insane level of detail and scale. It has deep lore, history, politics, drama, intrigue, friendship, love, loss, humor. Everything is believable. No other game I've played over the past 15 years is like it. Skyrim came kinda close but that was after a ton of modding and fixing.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#294Those "white men" (I guess Asian gaming isn't a thing?) are apparently doing a pretty good job appealing to women as some studies have suggested they're roughly half of the game playing demographic: http://www.dailydot.com/parsec/adult-women-largest-gaming-de... It may be correct that women want something different than men, but I don't think its true in the way they imagine. A lot of women seem to have enjoyed "The…
Maybe I'm cynical, but I tend to be skeptical of art that's more about a cause rather than about the art itself. I'll give an example: christian rock. I have no problem with christianity, or with rock, or with rock that is about christian themes or ideas. But I think we all know there's also a subgenre called "christian rock", which is generally a tacky, pretentious and overbearing imitation of the above things in th…
Your entire first paragraph reads just as well without the word "Christian". One-word proof: Nickelback.
I'm not even Christian, and I found myself enjoying an evangelical Christian rock CD as just good music, until I listened close enough to realize that I didn't agree with many of the lyrics.
Your second paragraph is simply the No True Scotsman fallacy, or the "all gay men are flamboyant" observational-bias fallacy. You are just saying that you don't like things you don't like, and you don't notice the intention behind things you like.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#295>We want games that aren't gritty, toxic pseudo-realistic pseudo-masculine nonsense nor frustrating time wasters that leave you feeling dead inside. We want games about how each of us could be in the future, how the world could be in the future. We want games built on compassion and respect and fearlessness. This is so much more interesting. Great. That's fantastic. We always need more games, and more types of games.…
Hey no one dies in Super Mario Bros. The mushrooms get swished and bopped off-screen.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#296> 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…
Part of the problem is that it's easier to implement a competition/kill/survive mechanism than to add realistic interpersonal social dynamics. If you want to avoid competition or at least killing things, you'll have to be a lot more creative. It's (relatively) much easier to find an audience for a film or book that is focused on dialogue, social interactions, and whatnot, than it is to do so for a game. I applaud eff…
Tetris was a blockbuster hit without realistic interpersonal dynamics.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#297I think we need to distinguish between video games as "multimedia entertainment experiences" and video games as play . Minecraft is essentially computerised Lego. There are few higher accolades I could pay to any game, because Lego is a phenomenally deep plaything. The more semantic meaning that the designer of a Lego set provides, the worse the play experience becomes. A bag of plain bricks can become anything, but…
> My gripe with most modern games is that they try too hard to tell a story. Designers in the AAA and indie space are often preoccupied with emulating the attributes of other media, rather than exploring the unique possibilities of video games. Any modern gamer is familiar with the "movie with quick-time events" trope, games that shoehorn meaningless interaction into linear storytelling.
The common problem is not with "trying to tell the story", the problem is usually as you said with its linearity. Making a reactive story with meaningful consequences to choices is hard and time consuming.
> A game can (and perhaps should) be a blank canvas rather than a work of art.
It should be a work of art which allows player to participate in a meaningful way. Compare it to a form of art where actor plays a role, but the play isn't set in stone, and you are that actor.
Roleplaying however is just one type of gaming activity. There can be other types of games, more focused on exploration for instance, puzzle solving or simulation and etc. While quite different categories, they all can be enjoyable computer games. Some tend to be more sport, than art.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#298There is nothing to support the author's typical feminist schtick of using diversity as a shorthand for blaming white men for the problems observed. Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience, that's why they're cheap mass entertainment. They're class and race-blind, and women do play them. Games can offer a free space to explore, play and excel, away from the judgement of real life, often wit…
Does this article scare you? You sound very defensive. I'm sorry to inform you that we do have a culture problem that is well documented, and you have identified yourself as part of the problem. > Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience Do you have some data to support your assertion there? That would mean that the same number of men and women play games. Because I've worked in games, and t…
The kind of "equality" you're arguing for is seriously overrated and often leads to more discrimination.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#299There is nothing to support the author's typical feminist schtick of using diversity as a shorthand for blaming white men for the problems observed. Video games already have a diverse, demographically blind audience, that's why they're cheap mass entertainment. They're class and race-blind, and women do play them. Games can offer a free space to explore, play and excel, away from the judgement of real life, often wit…
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…
Generally I play somewhat niche strategy games (paradox generally) that are absolutely not mission oriented or particularly violent (most of the violence is abstract). Every time there is a community poll it turns out that only about 1% of the community are female, which is way below the average of the games you're talking about.
So I very much doubt it's the mission orientation, guns/violence or sports that are putting women off games.
Re: Video Games Are Boring
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm cynical, but I tend to be skeptical of art that's more about a cause rather than about the art itself. I'll give an example: christian rock. I have no problem with christianity, or with rock, or with rock that is about christian themes or ideas. But I think we all know there's also a subgenre called "christian rock", which is generally a tacky, pretentious and overbearing imitation of the above things in th…
Your entire first paragraph reads just as well without the word "Christian". One-word proof: Nickelback. I'm not even Christian, and I found myself enjoying an evangelical Christian rock CD as just good music, until I listened close enough to realize that I didn't agree with many of the lyrics. Your second paragraph is simply the No True Scotsman fallacy, or the "all gay men are flamboyant" observational-bias fallacy…
> Your entire first paragraph reads just as well without the word "Christian". One-word proof: Nickelback.
Well no, my point is that when a work is primarily created to service an ulterior agenda (in my example, theology, but it could be any agenda), rather than for its own sake, the result is generally kitsch. I don't even mean that in a pejorative way, most entertainment is kitsch, and it's fine, people are entertained. Many (not all) "art" games tend to end up being kitschy because they're designed to signal and appeal to an elite in-group's values rather than being a true expression of ideas of their own. I think a piece has more artistic merit if it reflects ideas and truths the artist discovered for themselves, drawing on influences, instead of ideas that are designed to appeal to a certain set of people while signaling adherence to group values.