It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously
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Then it transitions into "Here's a list of questions to help you appreciate games on a deeper level", which is to me, both wrongheaded and insulting.
It's wrongheaded because who are you to say how people should enjoy games? People are different, unless someone is harming you, let them do what they want to do. Maybe someone spends all day as an academic educating graduate students about the deeper meaning of 19th century literature. At the end of the day maybe they're ready to just load up Team Fortress 2 and blow up some people with cartoony missiles.
To me, telling people "this is how you should enjoy games" is much more condescending than a post saying "these are the games you should enjoy, and these other games are bad." It's moving beyond just matters of taste into telling people how to think and how to behave.
There's another, bigger question to consider: if video games affect your mind so profoundly, it's probably a good idea to think a little before playing. I don't want to rephrase the article to say "think before buying," because that's an obvious part of anything we do--but if your pre-motor cortex actually replicates and primes your motor cortex to perform the Scout's baseball-bashing of Team Fortress 2, don't you at least want to consciously decide on what level it affects you? If you make the conscious decision to transfer TF2 only to area MT--which is essentially what you're arguing--then that decision should be conscious. Rather than just experiencing, isn't it legitimate to consider what your pre-motor cortex is acting out? Is it unreasonable to ask that we be consciencious about the workings of our minds during games?
This isn't to say that EVERY SINGLE TIME you play a game you should write a paper and submit it to a game magazine. I would rather you didn't do that, because I would like to do that, and you would be competing, and, yannow, capitalism.
This is just to say that it's reasonable to become aware of WHICH areas of your brain are affected--because whether you like it or not, your brain ACTIVELY practices killing. I'm not putting a moral label on that. I personally believe that's a good thing sometimes. I'm saying "Know thyself, brain-flesh-meatbag, and have fun playing."
So have fun. BTW, who's your favorite TF2 character? I am pretty much in love with the Scout.
When you see visual stimulus, it causes your brain to simulate that in your mind but it's not true that your brain is "practicing" that behavior. When you see or hear someone playing guitar, the same effect is happening in your brain. That doesn't mean that you can watch Stevie Ray Vaughan play "Rude Mood" 20 times and then play it yourself. Likewise you aren't going to turn into a killer no matter how many hours you spend playing GTA4.
On top of that, I think approaching the issue by telling people "think before you play games" is condescending and ineffective. It's like articles that say "think before you eat." Nobody reads that and says "Oh you're right! I was a mindless eating machine before and now I'm going to be more thoughtful." They think "Who's this jerk telling me what to do? I'm getting a KFC Sadness Bowl with extra bacon!"
You are obviously free to write whatever articles you want, I just found this one a bit condescending and also based on a false premise. It was clearly well intentioned and thoughtful, so I'm not trying to insult you or make you feel bad just express my reaction.
EDIT:
Also I don't play multiplayer FPS of any kind much these days but when I fire up TF2 once in a while I usually play the Soldier because it's most like the old Quake 1 days of rocket battles.
To support your point a little bit, some video game scholars, like Espen Aarseth, don't buy into the idea what the representations provide any relevancy:
[1]: "The "royal" theme of the traditional pieces is all but irrelevant to our understanding of chess. Likewise, the dimensions of Lara Croft's body, already analyzed to death by film theorists, are irrelevant to me as a player, because a different-looking body would not make me play differently (see sidebar). When I play, I don't even see her body, but see through it and past it."
While Aarseth has been quite extreme in his rejection of narrative, the main aspect of his argument is that gamers see the underlying constructs of the gameplay systems, and I think gamers choose whether to engage with the dressing that sits on top. Bioshock Infinite tells a story that you can listen to, but when you're playing you're not listening.
This explains the disconnect between players of GTA and observers. Those who observe and go "YOU KILLED THAT PROSTITUTE TO GET YOUR MONEY BACK AND YOU DON'T EVEN CARE" are viewing the game at the narrative level; whereas the gamers who do this are working at the mechanics level. It is a fallacy to then believe that those gamers are more susceptible to perform those actions they see at the narrative level in real life, as they were never there in the first place. The prostitutes aren't people, they're walking wallets. Bioshock tried to play with this idea with the Little Sisters, but I felt it ultimately failed, as the Little Sisters were sufficiently dehumanized that they looked a lot like walking health packs who would be put out of their misery. People who really do see others like this in real life already have a name; they're psychopathic. Fortunately, most people are not psychopathic :)
[1] http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigil...
The hats thing is about people meeting certain status motivational needs. Reiss' 16 Desires indicates that people seek status, and hats confer it. There's also a desire for collection, which hats also offer. You'll find many people who go "why do you care about hats? They don't change the game." For them, their desire for how they look or what they have isn't as meaningful. I'm hesitant to say "Reiss' 16 Desires is definitely correct" as all psychology is essentially pretty soft, but it does provide a useful framework for games motivation analysis, which is what I am currently supposed to be writing my PhD thesis on instead of procrastinating on HN :)
Some skins do confer gameplay bonus, even if they don't do it mechanically. League of Legends sells skins, and when you see someone with a champion with a skin on, you know they like that champion. It provides "skintimidation" to the other team.
I don't go as far as Aarseth in terms of rejecting aesthetics or narratives. I like that we have these things, and I like that they are better than they once were. I think most people feel that way. However, it's not a be-all-and-end-all proposition if you play a game that doesn't have a great story or stretches your moral compass. Those games could be wonderful games. There are plenty of great narratives with terrible games attached, like Heavy Rain.
There's room for everything, and I don't think pointing and saying "You're a bad game because of your narrative" is helpful. A better issue is "You're a bad game because of your ludonarrative dissonance" (such as Bioshock Infinite, where the character is trying to escape the ghosts of his past, but ends up murdering hundreds of people anyway) or "You're a bad game because your system simulation is completely screwed up" (imagine a SimCity where you were taught that people loved it if you polluted everything as long as there were low taxes). These are bad designs because they teach the wrong lessons. GTA is a wonderful marriage of design and story: the insanity that the players' are allowed to wreak fits in with the world created. The only way to play GTA subversively is to actually attempt to follow the law except when instructed not to (something Pippin Barr tried in [1]).
[1 pg. 200] http://www.pippinbarr.com/academic/Pippin_Barr_PhD_Thesis.pd...
I'm not going to play Bioshock or Dishonored or Call of Duty 42 simply because of "ooh, shiny!", but at the same time we won't complain if it's there. If all else is equal, we often go with the newer one. If I were to buy Bioshock Infinite (or the new Tomb Raider, etc), it would be because I'm interested in the story and the experience, of which the graphics are just part. Perhaps that's because graphics in PC games have been already Pretty Awesome for longer than I've been able to afford the hardware?
Because of the perceived social status conferred on them for having a rare or "cool" hat. It has nothing to do with the narrative vs mechanic question.
Besides, what's wrong with thinking before we eat? As the old Chinese proverb says, "let your food be your medicine." In both gaming and eating, science shows that it's legit to pay attention, to be "mindful" of what we're doing. That's okay. I mean, what's the counter-argument? Don't pay attention to what you eat? = P
It's a suggestion. She is sharing an opinion. Nowhere does she cast judgement on how or why you're enjoying your games. She's proposing a way to get a little more intellectual stimulation from games, and you can take it or leave it. While I personally think the specific questions are a bit too broad and shallow, there's no reason for the possibility of an alternative mode of thought to be offend me.
Because somebody says "try doing X," does not mean she says "you are bad for not doing X."
Blowing stuff up is fun? Try Robotron, or Serious Sam. You're saying I need to examine someone's motivation and weigh a game's social conscience before I install the thing, or I'm a bad person?
Get real. Blowing stuff up is fun.
Once upon a time at Atari, one of the head Marketroids in the home computer division decided "No violent games!" The problem was, all of the non-violent games they were able to come up with _stunk_. They sunk millions into developing titles that didn't sell.
I "played" _Dear Esther_ and it was interesting, but I uninstalled it and there's no point in going back; I won't play another game like that.
I want to play games with a social conscience as their primary mission about as much as I want to attend another mandatory sensitivity training. [For the record, I only had to do that once, a long time ago. :-) ]
For the most part, games are made to make money. This is what companies _do_. If you're saying that _Dear Esther_ is the answer, then the question is very silly indeed; it's not what the market wants.
[For the record, I do think that "bikini armor" in RPGs is stupid, and I wish they'd stop. But my Old Fart notions are swamped by the cash represented by a legion of 15 year old boys.]
Well thats the thing... I'm not saying that, and I'm 100% sure the blog author isn't saying that either. Asking yourself what the artistic value in the game is is not the same thing as (yet does often lead to) evaluating the game in a socio-political context. It is examining your responses to the game, be they intellectual or visceral, and asking what elements of the game trigger those responses. Ask yourself how those elements form a coherent experience.
I love shmups and action games. Right now I'm trying to get good at Devil May Cry 4, and the newest game I've played though is Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. These games have a strong focus on enabling creativity by giving the player avatar as much power and control as possible while balancing the enemy scenarios to still provide a challenge. Since stylish gameplay is the core of these games, asking exactly how the game gives the player so much control and creativity is fundamental to examining their artistic value. But they are also games with narratives: MGR:R is about a psychopathic former child soldier who's turned into a cyborg mercenary. He "refuels" by ripping out his enemies' spines and eating them. DMC4 begins with the series' half-demon protagonist crashing into a church and assassinating the pope. They are games with narratives, and whether or not the narratives are good, they impact the player experience and are certainly worth considering.
All anyone is saying is to try paying more attention to, and reflecting on, what you're thinking and feeling when playing games. You might enjoy them more. You might not.
I spend a crap load on games. Its come to the point now where I will check if a game has cheat codes before I purchase it. IMHO Assassin Creed 3, Far Cry 3, both super shitty games. And on top of being super shitty games the developers are wont let you control the world and insist you play the game the way it was intended.
Developers taking games too serious is ruining video games. Its not suppose to be serious its a video game, at least thats what my friends tell me after I cuss them out for beating me in Fifa...
That's why game modding has been popular (and made super-easy due to Steam Workshop), but that's PC only.
In the same way, some game developers are moving away from the idea of closed-code gaming--but we're talking indie games here. Minecraft is the best example ever. The download software actually includes folders for you to put in all your mods. And, in the end, that formula makes money. People like being able to add their creativity to your product, so why not let them?
So fear not, my friend, not all developers are as tightfisted as those COD folks. And, even when they do, for the technologically savvy, where there's a will, there's always a way. = )
I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.
You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman)
I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing art, too.
If you want to evaluate games seriously by looking through a narrative lens, I don't think video games could ever surpass books in their ability to tell a story. The ability to control an avatar "normally makes a coherent interpretation of the avatar and his / her behavior in regard to the game’s story quite difficult, if not impossible. Players usually don’t enact an ideal story – at least not in the first playthrough. Take James Bond games, for example. While you learn how to be as cool, cunning and competent as James Bond, you normally act like an idiot. Not taking cover when being shot at, forgetting to reload, getting lost, driving against water hydrants and being killed – all of this is far from an ideal realization of the James Bond character (Well Played 1.0 (don't recommend))."
Perhaps the argument could be made that video games give the player agency in the story in a way books don't so can excel narratively where books can't, but first of all how many games with a narrative focus really give the player any meaningful agency? And if I have meaningful agency, I'm writing my own story; I don't need to think deeply about what the author/designer is saying like this article advocates.
This essay isn't short, but I think he makes a lot of good points about the history of the Zelda franchise and argues the next Zelda would be better if it had no story: http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/ . Video games can have value and meaning that transcends narrative structures.
Could it be possible that some games should be judged primarily by cognitive challenges, and others by both?
Or, could it be possible that we don't need to judge games at all? o_O
Sounds weird, but this is what I mean. I'm actually in the article never once talking about evaluating the merit of a game on an objective level. It's not about judging games so much as judging how we interact with them. I'm talking about on a personal level, how the game interacts with you, and whether you find value out of it. If you find value only through area MT, that's a thing, I guess. But what if we find other ways of connecting our brains to a game--since the game is affecting those other areas already? On some level, who really cares about the "literary" or "cognitive" value of the game? On some level, you and I don't really give a velociraptor's feathers either way what some arbitrary standard says about a game. We care about how the game affects us.
What do you think? I dunno, you're very societally-minded here, and that takes the article beyond what I'd originally intended. Neat! I'm not sure how we should "judge games," I guess! Just interested in how it gets my brain. ^_^
"Wonderful ways to think about the games we play" would be a great article. I want to like this article, but it took too many mean turns. It's not considerate of all the reasons we play games.
As John McCarthy (AI, Lisp) used to say: "Hard distinctions make bad philosophy."
Although in Portal and Braid, the game's slow enough to allow for some thinking time... = P
People play to waste time, to socialize, to take their mind off things, to role play, to test their skills, to play a role outside their normal role, to practice English (or whatever their guild is speaking), to feel needed (in social games), to feel reckless (driving car and spinning out of control with no consequences). I probably left out hundreds of other reasons people play video games.
Telling this diverse group of people 'this is how you should play' isn't productive. You can target one of their goals - lets say the group that wants to socialize, and say 'make sure your guildies are fun loving people, not a boring bunch'. Or if the article is targeting role players - make sure the game is meaningful in some way. But simply saying "What’s the underlying message or moral with this game" to a group of people that may just be using the game to play hit-man, isn't very productive.
There's obviously some tricky differences, though. For one, each experience of a game is personalized by the choices made. Games can produce very similar experiences ("on rails" games) or very different experiences (a bad example but: playing WoW as one race vs. another can be quite different early on).
Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more seriously.
PS: Video Game Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?f...
If fact, these triggers have been deeply embedded in our social media too, turning both video games and social media into tools for manipulating our emotional selves into cycles of distraction and addiction.
There's billion dollar industries being created and supported on manipulating the emotional parts of people's brains into using their products for distraction.
So how the hell do we get back our ability to focus from these incredibly sophisticated distraction machines?
I've been working the past year on measuring meditation using physical sensors. My research has resulted in releasing an app to measure and track the depth of mindfulness meditation using a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor.
(http://www.buddhamindapp.com)
I see games incorporating physical sensors to see what's happening within us emotionally. With 9.5% of all kids between the ages of 4-17 diagnosed with ADD, we really need some new tools to fight back against the technology's creep into our minds.
With the latest update pushed into the app store, we can now measure the depth of your mindfulness meditation in real time. (By using an algorithm to measure heart rate variability).
Incorporated with this is a meditation quality score. We're working towards building a video game that teaches kids the ability to focus, and fights back against ADD.
So what does this have to do with the quality of games?
I think as the amount of information in our lives continues to explode, the two main problems for us will be keeping the noise and crap out, and filtering what we let in.
So those shooters will enter our dreams, we'll dream in their worlds. But what are they doing for us?
The next breakthrough in gaming is going to be in helping us manage and explore our minds, to live more optimal lives. It won't be enslaving us emotionally with achievements and unlocks. At least, I hope not.
Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.
World of Warcraft teaches lots of skills (see work by Joi Ito, like [1]), but I am sure you would put that in your "demonize" category.
Just like with other mediums like literature and cinema, you get into a lot of trouble very quickly when you start saying one art piece is worth more than another. Everything has value, even the most mindless game provides mindless escapism, and that is OK. It is OK to escape for a while.
The problem isn't games. The problem is that we have poor motivational draws for other life aspects. Try reading some intrinsic motivational theory like Self-Determination Theory or Reiss 16 Desires.
Even the horrible example I was thinking of (Call of Duty) has some benefits.
The problem is, I don't see real life ever being as seductive emotionally as the gaming life. More and more our synthetic realities (video games, social media) are becoming more emotionally charged than our physical layer of reality.
Just look at the number of people walking down the street with their faces in their phones. When they come home it's back to the computers and video games.
Where do we regain the ability to focus in the real world? Or is the constant distraction the new norm for us as a culture?
The problem isn't the technology, it's us. However, we've survived OK so far. Do I think people spend too much time on their phones Wall-E style? Sure. Do I think it's the phone's fault? No. I think it's an us thing, and we're still working out how to deal with it.
It wasn't long ago that a social convention was popping up where people would put their phones on the table and turn them all onto Airplane Mode. We need new social conventions, but the technology that invades our lives away from the desk is all very new in the grand scheme of things.
You are talking about beings, (humans), that believe in religion and political propaganda. We are addicted to noise and crap being in our heads.