(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

[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.