(no subject)

[egypturnash]

As a side note, since some people seem to want to convince me that Bioshock is actually a really good game - an opinion you're welcome to have; it's clearly a finely-crafted instance of an experience I simply don't care to have - I would like to note that so far, the only FPS I've actually enjoyed as a game is Thief, which I've been playing on and off the past week via Rik's machine. I had fun with System Shock 2 a couple years back but by the end, I was sick and tired of the basic game mechanics and just wanted to find out what happened to SHODAN. I really don't like FPSs.

As I've gotten older, I've slowly learnt how to see people as, well, people. I'm not very good at it; I never was. As video-game technology marches on, the creatures the games pit you against have gotten more like people. When I play some games made in the last decade or so, I can feel them training me to see people as just things. I'm still working out what factors make this happen; it's only a handful of games that do this so far.

I really think that the increasing drive for 'realism' in video games means that the game industry has a big moral quandry coming up. The forty-year-long focus on the hurt button as the core mechanic becomes creepier as the things you hurt become more and more like people. What happens when the project lead on a game focused on killing and blood plays his game and feels that weird sense that it's gnawing away at something in his soul? What happens when this is a regular occurrence?

A few major choice-points over, there's another me who went into video games. Is she (or he; I might never have transitioned in that life-path) getting ever more uncomfortable with these themes, or has it been completely burnt out of her by this point?

Comments

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I'm not enamored of realistic violence, either. I also feel the same about realistic language or sexuality in games as well, but that's another issue. :)

So far, every game I have worked on has been essentially rated "T for Teen" even if the gameplay itself was complicated enough to fall into an older market segment (Battlezone and Battlezone 2). Aside from that, there has been no realistic violence, language, or sexuality in any game I've worked on. I've been helping out on Mercenaries 2 for the past few months and even that is fairly bloodless (if nihilistic).

Adding graphic violence, strong language, or blatant sexuality does not make your game better. It might make it more realistic (depending on the context), but I think it's more often a crutch to get more attention or appealing to specific market segments. (It's often a matter of "if you can't be good, be controversial".)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I wish there was even half as much realistic sexuality in video games as there is realistic violence. But that's not unique to video games; see the George Carlin routine (on 'Class Clown' IIRC) where he goes over this issue by doing a bunch of generic Western dialogue, with 'kill' replaced by 'fuck'.

Controversial: I can't help but think of Rockstar's 'Manhunt', which was (by all reports; I never actually tried the thing) full of tons of really unpleasant violence, and not actually a good game underneath that. And sold like ass.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Overt sexuality in games tends towards gratuitous soft-core pornography, primarily existing to make the game more "edgy", "raw", or "controversial". Like extreme violence, it tends to add little if anything to the experience.

No amount of sex, violence, or language can make a bad game good. You'd think that developers would have figured this out by now, but good marketing can sell anything, especially if it's big, loud, and flashy.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

This culture has a big problem with overt sexuality. It's like the only model we have for it is the dubbed-in moans and bad music loops of porn, hard or soft. All the cultural models our media hands us for it are terrible.

I don't know what a mature appearance of sex in a video game would be like. It's so far removed from the attack/defense world that games live in that it's hard to visualize. What play mechanics would go into a seduction, into a joyous exploration of someone else's body? Working that out would take several months (at least) of brainstorming and prototyping, that nobody would bother doing because the end results would inevitably be rated AO, and nobody wants to carry those. But we have well-established mechanics for violence that we can scale up and down.

As long as the screenshots look appealing... it can be sold.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Weapons and violence—even "cute" versions—are easily recognizable and lend themselves readily to "dramatic conflict". Non-violent subjects take more work to translate into compelling gameplay and present in an attention-getting manner. That difficulty makes it hard to get the game green-lighted.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Yeah. And thus the medium continues to be inextricably linked to one set of reactions; the games that get the most resources allocated to crafting a deep, beautiful experience are also the ones that have to dig the furthest into this tradition.

This is kinda where I was trying to go with that little bird game I was playing with: I wanted to make something that could get you into that no-mind reflex place... that was about something besides destruction. I ran into some technical and design snags and shelved it.

We give a lot of our free time to video games. Time where we're open and uncritical. I'm getting more and more concerned about the fact that the situational analysis this programs into us is so frequently about destruction.

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

It's a very pernicious positive feedback loop. Violence is the easiest way to produce dramatic tension, which draws people people who enjoy that kind of content to gaming and excludes those who don't, so gamers expect that sort of content from games and reject games that don't meet their expectations. This effect becomes most pronounced at the "hardcore" end of the gamer spectrum, those willing to spend thousands of dollars on hardware and games and eat, sleep, and breathe games. The game industry itself is heavily stocked with people from that end of the spectrum, particularly designers. Developers tend to produce what they like to play, this feeds into the cycle.

I like the bird "un-game", and I think it would make a nice casual game if given a way to "win" or "lose". The dramatic conflict could just a never-ending battle against entropy, but that "end" is the only thing missing. It would be an Orsinal type of game, and that's definitely a good thing.

The things you've described are why I tend to gravitate towards games and genres that don't revolve around going toe-to-toe with recognizable people and reducing them to chunky salsa. While the Half Life series games are obviously first-person shooters, they don't seem to revel in blood and violence to the degree of the Doom, Quake, and Unreal Tournament series.

Your experiences with the Grand Theft Auto series sum up why I refuse to play them, even though they are highly-regarded examples of the open-world genre. It would only be worse with highly-realistic models, animations, and physics.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

yeah. These are the people who have already had their ideas of what a genre is shaped by every single installment of it; someone at the point of making a pro-level FPS has probably played every notable FPS they can get their hands on. And they've got to make a few straight ones themselves before they can even begin to start questioning the conventions in the name of novelty, let alone moral grounds. If they ever do.

There's probably something to say about the cultures from the games they produce, too. Compare a game from a small and large developer from the US, France, England, Japan... the large Western games will probably all converge on the US market, but the small ones will show off their different cultural attitudes in a lot of subtle ways.

The bird game, as it stands, needs a couple more elements to juggle. I have a few ideas but none of them felt quite right. Or were really too much heavy lifting for Flash.

[ysabel.livejournal.com]

I've been reading H-game reviews lately looking to see if something like that is maybe going to come around there. I'm not convinced yet, but it does look like there are some H-game makers who're starting to experiment with game mechanics.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Hmm! I get the impression most of those have a pretty juvenile view of sex, unfortunately... but yeah, if anyone's going to be experimenting with that, it might well be someone who's been cranking out softcore porn games, and is getting tired of implementing the easy mechanics again and again.

I am the one you feared!

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

I played Battlezone when I was a teen... and I didn't even know it was based on an original Atari title (at the time)!

Re: I am the one you feared!

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Activision's Battlezone was a case where the license actively hurt us. People familiar with the original and expecting an arcade-style vehicle shooter were likely shocked by the pervasive tactical and strategic elements. People unfamiliar with the original would be unswayed by the name we paid a fair amount of money for. We would have been better off giving it some other name, though I have no idea what that would have been. :)

Alternate title

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Moon tanks of the seventies!

Re: Alternate title

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Ahahaha... :D