'Seeking connection': video game where players stopped shooting, started talking

That's the kind of troll I love. Technically they taught me another useful thing in the process, and it cost me effectively nothing because I could just reroll the character. High effort and low payoff is the best kind.

I never played EVE Online much, but I've heard there was a time some player were camp-killing newbies (known as Suicide ganking) in Jita star system which is a tradehub with a lot of activities. It got so bad CCP has to ban players who's doing that.

Another game, Elite Dangerous, also faces ganking problems, some people just doing it shamelessly (judging by the videos they uploaded), some even do it with cheat enabled.

Based on that, I think what you've experienced is rather rare. Maybe the individual are just a good person who's willing to do good even in a competitive environment, and you're lucky to have encountered such person.

You can’t always avoid people who are aggressive towards others, but I’ve found that my life is a lot more stressful when I work with aggressive people, so I actively try to avoid these situations and work in more collaborative environments.

Which is interesting, because the early Steam reviews loved the fact that the game was mostly cooperative. Most players were helpful or neutral, but some would attempt to kill you. This meant that running into other players was tense. Would they heal you? Would they help you take down a machine? Or would they rob you? You had to guess, and guess quickly.

Then there was a big influx of Twitch viewers who were just there for PvP.

I actually think the "mostly cooperative but not always" dynamic is a really interesting vibe, but probably a hard one for the developers to maintain.

Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.

It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.

Back when games were mostly 2D, a lot of action games got consolidated into platformers. Shooters just seem to be the equivalent genre in 3D.

My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.

With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.

Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.

> Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.

Someone should have told the US Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army

(Surprisingly for a government project it was pretty playable)

But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.

And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...

But aside from that, Campster argued in his video about violence in games (<https://youtu.be/wSBn77_h_6Q>) that violence is easier to program in an accessible way than nonviolence.

Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).

These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.

I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.

And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.

To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.

I thought Death Stranding was supposed to be less-stressful but I’m quite near the start and so far I’ve got to worry about items degrading, inventory management and enemies. I was just looking for more of a peaceful walking simulator game. I wish more games had a non-combat option, or maybe a “Jesus take the wheel” mode for the stressful bits that turns it into more of an interactive cutscene.

(It came frustratingly close to this if you kept playing after beating the game, but there were still guns and still some hostiles wandering around, IIRC)

There are so many other ways to chat and make friends without breaking tem balance.