Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs
nautil.us
nautil.us
This is not a fair characterization of the game. Yes, you can avoid doing those morally reprehensible things but not if you actually want to play the game. In much the same way if you feel it's morally wrong to stomp goombas, you can avoid doing so in Super Mario Bros. But unlike the latter, you cannot proceed in GTAV without engaging in some of those undesirable actions.
The notion that we're making these choices independent of the game is disingenuous.
By the way, it was the greatest computer RPG ever made - at least until that point. I know, that's just my opinion but I have conviction.
Err... I'd stop gaming after Fallout Tactics, but that's a topic for another day.
The consequence is lighter, of course, and GTA "lives" more independent and ephemeral.
What makes games like GTA interesting to researchers is the open, unstructured analog to our world. If the game lacked the strong user direction and context it could be useful in that regard.
I play GTA and such as videogames, not as morality simulators, because as morality simulators they fail, because there is hardly any moral theory that applies to them. Utilitarianism doesn't tell me to be moral in GTA, because the utiles in my accidentally running down a pedestrian simply because I got impatient at a red light and just drove anyhow is null. Deontological ethics doesn't tell me to take good care of numbers in a computer, unless you adopt a set of rules that says otherwise purely in the name of being contrary for this post alone. (In which case I'd also like you to analyze the ethics of the numbers you changed simply in the act of posting your contrary reply.) Consequentialism doesn't tell me to be concerned about the value of numbers in a computer; I would have higher regard for the health and well being of an individual bacterium than a pedestrian in GTA.
If you tried to read my personality by how I play GTA, you're going to get a very wrong reading, because I am well aware of how null the whole thing is, and I act accordingly. Nor do I find myself learning very much about myself. Nor do I find myself meditating on how flimsy the moral structure is constraining me, because GTA is not "just like the real world except for a few minor differences". It is utterly unlike the real world. It is completely unsuitable for any sort of moral analysis because in a very real way, the entire idea of morality applying to GTA is simply ludicrous, as ludicrous as the idea that I am a psychopath from a family of psychopaths because when we play chess with each other we kill, kill, kill without mercy or concern for how the poor chessmen feel.
It runs afoul of some formulations of Virtue ethics, where the idea is to cultivate certain proclivities and habits/patterns of thinking and behaving that make you “virtuous.”
In this case, the argument is that diminishing your capacity for empathy/compassion and gratifying violent or anti-social impulses are bad for you.
To implement virtue in duty: "You have a duty to act the actions of a virtuous person." To implement consequentialism in duty: "You have a duty to make a best-effort estimation of the outcomes, and choose the best."
To implement duty in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who knows these rules and lives by them." To implement consequentialism in virtue: "A virtuous person is one who always evaluates the possible outcomes, and chooses the best."
To implement duty in consequentialism: "Define 'good outcome' such that any good outcome is one where all of these rules were followed." To implement virtue in consequentialism: "The only truly valuable thing is personal virtue. Therefore, a 'good outcome' is one where you gain as much virtue-trait-stuff as possible."
All three approaches only work if one accepts them, and then goes on to implement them all the time, for all the decisions made. Not possible, hence evil in the world. Hence conservatism is correct. I have been wrong all my life. Any philosophical means to achieve a better world that assumes good humans being good all the time, or even most of the time, is doomed to fail.
This is literally the problem virtue ethics was formulated to solve. It's less about the ideal decision and more about what virtues and habits you have cultivated in yourself.
For most situations, all ethical schools of thought wind up with the same answer (unless you’re an Ayn Rand devotee). Those aren’t the interesting parts of ethical theory though, the places where they disagree are the margins where the actual theoretical work is being done.
Even puppies understand play vs. reality because it is so fundamental. I don't know how anyone can buy the concept that mashing the A button on a controller is going to turn you into a murderer or reveal your truest self.
Mario absolutely "kills" Bowser in the original games. Though, of course you're quite correct that he returns in the sequels, and it's heavily implied that the Koopa clan does not die upon contact with lava, unlike the rest of the creatures in the kingdom.
Bowser, on the other hand, is a named character with a specific personality. Combined with supplementary materials and (in some Mario games, especially the RPGs) in-game dialogue, it’s clear that he’s meant to be a single character who Mario (also a single character) encounters repeatedly.
I sort of now want a PETA for video game pixels.
1) Knights of the Old Republic: One mission is to steal something form an enemy headquarters. It's possible to sneak all the way to the item and steal it without being detected, but they forced a cutscene when you take it that makes you fight a boss battle.
2) In Morrowind, there are at least some missions where you're just supposed to collect some artifacts but they tag on something where you have to kill a guard even when they're not actually keeping you from getting the item.
There have never been children in any GTA game.
The more interesting modern use case is when people say: "there's this game on my phone I play a lot that helps me with my anxiety." And it's usually something trivial like a free Puzzle Bobble clone that was developed in a week at zero-budget. But for that player, its a lifeline, a coping mechanism.
That's very interesting to me. What is it about this gameplay mechanic that relieves stress? It can't just be escape. To me it seems it has to tap into something more intrinsic than archetypal "hunter-gatherer" era categories.
Isn't this just the definition of enjoyment? Satisfying basic needs is the only reason anybody does anything.
So I think enjoying something is more long term, higher level aspect than pleasure, which seems more short term. Which explains a lot why people engage in activities which they may not really enjoy, but get the short term pleasure hit. e.g. binge eating, binge TV watching etc
ie there are drives (eg water when thirsty) but there are other desires too
"We are set up genetically to learn the environment/culture around us. If we have media that seems to our nervous systems as an environment, we will try to learn those ways of thinking and doing, and even our conception of reality."
In the show, the device physically stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain to the point that players are highly addicted & easily manipulated.
I interpret it as allegory to the way "real" video games leverage variable rewards & other reinforcement to do something similar.
I think nautil.us should write an article on positive effects of mobile phone connectivity. The snobs are looking down on that just like they are on video games.
Recreate Lord of the Flies with GTAV? =)
The problem seems to be more about the constant stimuli that comes from internet enabled devices and video games. I grew up without access to much video games or the internet but that made me dream up entire fantasy worlds as a kid, because I was bored. I don't think the current environment allows kids that kind of space to just be bored and create things via imagination.
I'm not a child specialist though so I might be totally wrong about this.
For most of human history transportation through urban centers was done primarily on foot and roads were designed to facilitate that. Contemporary urban planning is designed around speedily moving motorized vehicles through and the streets, such as they are, are rivers of traffic that pedestrians have to hurry themselves across during the short windows of time that cars aren't speeding by.
The invention of the automobile has been terrible for letting kids roam around. On the flip-side of the dangers they face in urban centers, the ones growing up in newer suburban areas lack the density to have an appreciable amount of kids of similar ages within walking/biking distance of each other. Many older style, "streetcar" suburbs do, but we haven't build many of those in the past 30 or so years.
I read "Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs" while developing my own MUD and it seemed _very_ applicable. Both from a gamer and a developer perspective. I'm not sure the FA's reference to that paper makes it necessarily bad.
The Bartle Test is a pretty common tool / consideration in gaming psych & gamified interfaces.
What I have a problem with is researchers attempting to drawn a relationship between video game preferences and basic needs. To me this reeks of Jack Thompson.
The point is why they have these preferences, and what these preferences lead to in terms of how different people might approach the same game.
You could present a counter article instead of just telling us how much you don't like the premise of this one.
Anecdotally, I know blasting the crap out of demons in Doom does a pretty good job of channelling my anger. It's cathartic and not something society typically caters for.
A lot of games are about building efficient systems, which naturally would attract people that like solving problems with designs and creativity.
You are dismissing the entire premise of the article based on a dislike for one man that tried (and failed) to convince America that GTA was a murder simulator. A man that (if you bother to read up on what he is up to now) doesn't even believe any of the shit he said back then and actually apologised for it.
Can you provide a pointer to that? I haven't found anything in that regard, either at Wikipedia nor searching at news sites.
He is teaching prisoners civics in Florida now after suffering major stress/depression and marriage problems resulting from his crusade. He went into how the whole thing started because stores were selling violent games to under-age kids and even parents were buying them and that's what he took issue with.
Based on his medical background and knowledge of how entertainment affects the brain he believed that kids that young and also the mentally disabled should not have access to violent games, but because he was beaten in court (multiple times) he began to make tenuous links everywhere between violence and games, music and movies and began behaving very legally dubious in pursuing his cases like a fanatic to the point where he was calling for all-out bans and ridiculous punishments.
He was eventually disbarred and went through a few years of trying not to be such an angry asshole.
From the way the article ended it seemed like he had gone through a positive transformation.
My issue with this article is the entire concept of video games meeting basic needs is extreme reductionism at best. People are complex creatures and almost never have singular reasons for liking a type of entertainment.
People's preferences can be measured and graphed fine, but you can't, in good faith, assign a simple basic needs reason for their preferences.
I'm not saying that there's no such thing as opposing traits, but as far as I know the validated descriptions use continuous dimensions rather than assigning people to corners.
That changed in the late 1980s, when the source code for TinyMUDs and MUSHes and DikuMUDs started becoming publicly available, and the userbase fragmented; the playerkillers went onto their games, the guys who wanted to chat went onto the games optimized for that, the roleplayers to another game, and so on. Nowadays, when there is a clash of playertypes, the misfits tend to get policed off the server - playerkiller types will get kicked out of other servers for griefing, people who optimize their gameplay too hard will get thrown off the roleplaying servers, and so on...
Bartle's insight is actually specific to his time period and his game and the few other MUDs (AberMUD, MIST etc) that were around while running one was hard to do. The insight still holds, but it would have been harder to spot at a later date, when everybody went their separate ways...
He specifically doesn't like being given sole credit - http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2015/QBlog130515A.html
> This is why when people introduce me as "the man who invented online games" or whatever, I always mention that I co-invented them with Roy Trubshaw.
(and the rest of that paragraph)