I like the idea. But I always wondered to what extend this holds up. Rigorously followed wouldn't that imply the old argument that playing brutal games makes people more brutal in real life?
Shouldn't we be banning slasher flicks then?
When I was watching A Nightmare on Elm Street as a kid, I never once thought "I wish I could murder people in their dreams with a glove full of knives."
Study after study refutes your unsubstantiated claim, so the burden of proof is on you here.
After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work.
> After a fashion. I mean you would have to imagine that game as though it was IRL and it was actually you who were in it. Now add in what you saw, thought, smelled and tasted, mix in with that actual hatred of the enemy and the euphoria of victory... than yeah, that shit would work.
Or it self selects for people willing to "play" those games.
I just picked up the Hotline Miami collection for Switch and started playing for the first time. It's an ultra-violent top-down game that tries to have you question your own motivations.
It's a fun game with good mechanics, so I've been enjoying it. If it were 2060 level VR in first person with Smell-o-Vision and hyper-realistic graphics, I wouldn't be playing it at all.
I just want to turn this 180 degrees for a second. Imagine yourself having created The App of 2020. It's a social site that has had so many downloads and signups that the web version went down in the third week. You've been front page on HN 4 times since your launch and techcrunch and Wired have been hounding the shit out of you for an interview. You actually had to buy a burner phone because your regular number is currently under siege. Wall Street is already talking about the IPO and Sequoia Capital has actually Sent People to You because they are dying to write you a 9 figure check.... Imagine that.
Are your palms sweating? ...because mine are as I type this.
Hypotheticals like this are always hard. An honest answer is that I don't believe I would, no. But until you're in that situation, you don't know for sure.
OIC, (lol) I don't play online games (my car is parked outside--so, I have no need for them), I get the connection now though. But you would take a call from Sequoia Capital I bet :)
If the player entirely buys into the reality of the game, then every character not killed was brought to life by the player. Creation of life must be given equal weight to ending of life, shouldn't it? And what lives are these? Mindless drones typically walking eternally in a loop. No family. No friends. No change. It is a desperate hell if considered reality. And the polygonal structure, the low resolution textures, all of those technical limitations, those have to be being processed as reality too, right? (If not, why not?) What consequences does that have? How about the altered physics of the game world? Shouldn't players have great difficulty simply getting around if they accept the physics in games and attempt to act in the real world in accordance with them?
Games draw an awful lot from film. Film is an artform that laces together absurd lies and unreality into an experience that the audience can accept as 'real.' It's a very fascinating subject. If you take a camera, and you point it at two people having a fightfight, do you know what the response of the audience will be? 'Meh. Doesn't seem real.' But instead add a musical track that didn't exist in reality, add cuts in perspective that are impossible for any body/brain/eyes combo to accomplish, take out the meat-slapping sounds of landing hits and substitute in recordings of snapping celery and carrots, and blammo, the audience is on the edge of their seat saying "now that was a REAL fight." Except, of course, no, it wasn't. It is precisely because it bore so little resemblance to actual reality that it worked and the audience were able to maintain their willful suspension of disbelief. The audience is engaging conceptually, but not viscerally.
Games crank that up even further. And they do such a good job of it that is causes us language problems. When people talk about games, they talk about the concepts as if they are real. It is primarily the analysts of games that are least capable of dealing with them in any capacity aside from accepting the concepts as real, while ignoring the real material facts of them. It's like they're so totally un-real and there is so obviously no question at all of their unreality that people just ignore it and proceed on a level of "but what if their CONCEPTS were real and people couldn't tell the difference? Not people like me, of course, but maybe worse people, like young people!"