Are you familiar with "Sniper Elite"? (Slowmo murder porn)
Do you know the stories they build into Battlefield games these days? (nuking iran, america fuck yeah)
Games are horrible... and mainly made for kids.
Why So Few Violent Games?
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Angel Studios released Resident Evil 2 in 1999. Non-violent you say?
IMHO, I don't think violence is the main point of Resident Evil, it's more about the horror/suspense. A bit different than mindless violence as in e.g., GTA, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
I agree that RE is not as bad as GTA, but I don't care what adults do in their free time, and children shouldn't be playing GTA period. I don't think you can seriously make the argument that RE isn't a violent game though.
The "point", or motivation, isn't all that relevant. You're still shooting things in the face and getting your throat torn out while you writhe in pain, so let's keep the goalposts in place.
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#53Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#54I have to imagine the arguments or excuses that the author is parodying. I guess they are excuses that there are more violent games because violent interactions are easier to simulate than non-violent interactions. Rather than do a parody, I'd just point out that excuses about simulation are crappy because games hardly simulate anything. Outside of rigid-body physics, game logic is just a nonsense of magical rules. W…
I'm guessing its simple, blind evolution. D&D and such had kill-and-gather-loot mechanics, and were pretty popular. So many offshoots of that genre got written and sold. Evolve some wings and fins etc and we are where we are.
If we actually decided where we wanted to go with video games, we could get somewhere. Til then we're going to wander around in this violent killfest wasteland, upgrading the graphics on the explosions.
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#55This article rightly points out that violence isn't actually much simpler to simulate than social interaction; it's just that players accept crude simulation because it's still fun. Space Invaders is essentially a game of Breakout with reskinned sprites, but just providing those skins lets the player imagine the details of an alien invasion.
Maybe a similarly crude level of simulation could work for social games, if the artwork allows players to get immersed in the game and fill in details with their imagination. Japanese relationship games and dating sims get part of the way there; since they're "visual novels," they can convey subtleties of character through narration, instead of having to come up with game mechanics for everything. The actual mechanics are little more than a single love/hate score for each girl, with the player successfully dating one when their score gets high enough (and getting a "bad end" if all are low -- or if too many are high).
Chris Crawford on Game Design mentioned that for the game Gossip, he simulated relationships as a network of springs. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossip_%28computer_game%29) The closer Alice is to Bob, the more she can influence his opinion of (distance from) Carol. Another spring-based AI by Michael Heasell (Wizard Dude) won CodeCombat's programming tournament. (http://blog.codecombat.com/a-31-trillion-390-billion-stateme...) This "system of springs" could be the core of a social game the way "collision detection" is the core of shooters.
I suspect that one could create a relationship simulator with an emergent storyline by modeling the characters' relations towards each other (not just having a love/hate counter for their relations with the protagonist), and by having a skilled writer create dramatic scenarios triggered on certain conditions and "everyday" scenarios to move the plot along and provide chances to adjust the relationships. The standard plot tree of a dating sim would become a plot graph. It's still a far cry from real human interaction, but Call of Duty is far from real warfare and it sells anyway. The hard part is modeling just the interesting parts and making an entire playthrough be "fun."
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand the appeal. What's the appeal of action movies? It's fun. Haven't you ever tried blowing something up when you were a kid?
That's begging the question. Why is it fun?
It's just the way we are. We like dominating and winning. There's at least a little bit of bloodlust in everyone, without those traits we wouldn't be able to become the dominant species on our planet.
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#57The author is sarcastic, but actually quite right. We don't have many games that actually explore violence, give it a deeper meaning or use it as a rhetorical device (like GTA V did superficially with the torture scene). There are many games with a violent shell, but it's actually about scoring points. Killing an enemy in an FPS gives me the same kind of satisfaction as solving lines in Tetris. The last time I played…
Oddly enough, one game that hit me hard with the violence in it was Pikmin. Simple and cute, you can't help but learn to love and nurture your little underlings, but as the game progressed it became tougher to overcome challenges and before long you started having to plan on sacrificing percentages of your Pikmin just so you could achieve your goal. The first Pikmin death (with a beautifully haunting wail) hit me pre…
I was too young to "appreciate" the gruesomeness of Pikmin when I played it, but your post got me thinking if it was intentional. For anyone interested, I found an interview that covers the topic right at the beginning: http://www.gonintendo.com/s/208519-miyamoto-on-pikmin-3-and-...
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#58I have to imagine the arguments or excuses that the author is parodying. I guess they are excuses that there are more violent games because violent interactions are easier to simulate than non-violent interactions. Rather than do a parody, I'd just point out that excuses about simulation are crappy because games hardly simulate anything. Outside of rigid-body physics, game logic is just a nonsense of magical rules. W…
> why isn't it standard in games that gifting the love interest a rare flower makes them follow you around in some sort of ridiculous simulacrum of infatuation
Actually, it is. Try giving a porkchop to a wolf in minecraft :)
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#59Are you familiar with "Sniper Elite"? (Slowmo murder porn) Do you know the stories they build into Battlefield games these days? (nuking iran, america fuck yeah) Games are horrible... and mainly made for kids.
whoosh
Re: Why So Few Violent Games?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, even extremely graphically violent games on the surface can be felt as non-violent in a competitive setting. I recall this "playing to win" essay, talking about Street Fighter. (If characters punching each other to unconsciousness is not violent, I don't know what is.) In fighting games, competitive players tend to concentrate on the structure behind punches and suffering. They see a game of anticipati…
It's interesting that you bring up Mortal Kombat, which wasn't the first fighting game, or necessarily even the best fighting game, but it certainly was the one that looked the most like two characters punching each other to death.
Actually, I choose to name that one precisely because of its violence. Hopefully helps make my point.
I would have liked to select another name for its underlying mechanics, but I'm not knowledgeable enough.