(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

[stinkygoat.livejournal.com]

I don't really like realism. I like to be abstract to the point where more than being construed as a destructive action, you might consider the shots in a shooter to be not so much killing something as letting off pretty fireworks or something. Too much realistic crunching of bone and spurting of blood and killing of people or creatures doesn't really appeal because for one it's not something I'd ever actually want to do in a realistic world, nor is it anything I'd want to do to relax, and for me the places i want to go when i'm gaming are chilled abstract spaces where I can fit in to some kind of beautiful rhythm and structure and candy-coloured procedural feedback loop where every action and motion just feels nice. A bit like being off your tits but without the necessity for actually taking any drugs.

I also like the idea that people could enjoy watching me play in the same way they might enjoy watching a fireworks show. Just dancing in the light and enjoying the way it all moves and the stuff that follows beautifully from actions.

Crunching bone and spurting blood and the death of creatures have no part in that, really. It's just the intersection of bits of neon energy, and I want to make that intersection pretty and enjoyable and satisfying and lovely rather than disturbing. Not everyone will like that, I know, but hey :).

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

There's this weird thing in Western culture where abstraction and simplification are considered to be 'for kids'. 'Realism' is for adults. And media with roots in abstraction, like games, or like the cartoons and animation my career involves, has to wallow in 'realism' as it tries to mature and grow up. Which somehow seems to translate into 'all the horrible stuff a moody 12-year-old boy draws in his notebook'.

I've had the occasional moment of no-mind while playing a game: I stop thinking and just sit back and watch my reflex loops play it. I almost wonder if that's a reason in and of itself to avoid hyperviolent games - I don't feel like it's really a good idea to be in a meditative, open-to-the-world state when your main sensory input is anti-life brutality.

I like the way you intersect bits of neon. It's made me giggle happily for years.