(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

[turbinerocks.livejournal.com]

There have actually been advancements in realistic conversational AI, but they tend not to find their way into AAA titles for consoles. There's an indie game called Facade, it's somewhat of an experiment, but it does a good job of simulating human interaction. It's an approach I hope more games will play with, but it's not a selling point for the average AAA console player, it won't immediately push units like next generation (expensive) graphics tech will, so I doubt it'll happen anytime soon.

The problem of simulating moral choices and interactions to this extent in an RPG (let alone a game like Bioshock, where the development costs for tacking on parallel tracks would be astronomical) is so much other data is dependent upon your choices, the developers would just be buried in flags and conditions for every single conversation. Most of the REALLY good dialogue I've seen in games depends on the game having a fairly structured and linear storyline (Planescape: Torment) or freedom at the expense of everyone in the gameworld sounding alike or parroting the same responses (Morrowind/Oblivion). Baldur's Gate would be somewhere in between. If you play the same RPG multiple times, it starts to become very apparent how simply structured most RPGS are, where your moral choices trip a switch and affect a couple conversations, but not much in the game really changes. It's a tough problem. I come down on the side of a strong story, go-anywhere-do-anything games rarely live up to their promise for me.