(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. 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.