[internisus]

Seriously. I've been thinking about this lately. Videogames are ridiculous and juvenile. While I haven't done it much lately, those of you who know me are aware of my tendency to clamor for games to be more, and yet I perpetually find myself drawn to games as they are. Is it because I am some sort of man-child? What is the appeal? Timesinks and artificial achievements?

I've gone on about wanting videogames to progress beyond abstract conventions, but I am thoroughly compelled by RPG systems with their numerical stats and levels. Why? Well, I've justified it so far as quantifiable systems of character development answering to a kind of existential uncertainty. But is it that simple?

It certainly can't be because of fun; I'm too much of a snob for that.

The other obvious answer in certain cases is the appeal of immersive simulations of dangerous and extraordinary activities and environments. I think that I can live with that. And interactive fiction needs no legitimization as far as I'm concerned. But the set of games that appeal to me extend beyond these justifications.

I like videogames. I like videogames!

I want to talk about videogames!

It's ridiculous! You should see the kinds of pictures and video that fill my harddrive! What kind of a person cares about this stuff?!

What do you think?
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Thinking about videogames.

[leoboiko]

Some reasons out of the blue:

- Simulations. Simulations are fascinating. Videogames are doing a poor job at interesting simulations, IMHO, but still it’s a whole new take at “creating other worlds” than simply static fiction.

- Second-person fiction. As soon as you require the user to press a button to make the text advance, you open enough space to tell stories in the second person without breaking suspension of disbelief (an impossible feat in oldmedia). That’s why we find RPG stories compelling and grow attached to them, even though they’re mostly crap — it’s crap in which *you* are the hero.

- Dancing. Videogames in this site’s sense are really audiovideogames; they’re synchronized patterns of light and sound which react to your intention in pleasurable ways if you’re skilled enough. Bit Generations’ Dotstream is probably the clearest example I’ve seen, but really, just fire up your favourite classic game and pay attention to how much it’s like dancing.

- Random reinforcement. Basically the whole point of WoW & the like.

- Carefully crafted learning curves, with much higher effort-to-reward ratios than real life. Farm life in Bokujō Monogatari / Harvest Moon is much easier than actual farming, and even someone like me who never had the patience to learn guitar could “play” songs in Guitar Hero after ten minutes. Performing well at my job is *hard*. Finishing Beneath a Steel Sky (which I just did) requires so little effort by comparison.

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

We like videogames because we grew up with videogames. They were our source of whimsy and awe, and later down the line, a part of our identity.

As kids, our toys tended to be whatever we wanted them to be. Videogames were a bit different, we didn't project our desires onto them--our desires changed to incorporate the game. They were just that cool.
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{V}_{^w^}_{V}

[leoboiko]

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

Like I said, videogames were different.

A short anecdote: As a kid, I played videogames with my toys--not the other way around, if you know what I mean. Homeworld inspired things I built with lego, but I never really played any of the lego games.
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[Mr. Toups]

Even in their most puerile infancy videogames are a fascinating medium. Agency as narrative is a pretty exciting thing. Even if only comes down to stupid power fantasies. Games are also the most in-depth form of escapism... especially games which focus on exploration of well-crafted virtual worlds. Like... Silent Hill, for instance, is basically visiting a strange and amazing place and becoming intimately familiar with it. While a lot of books and movies can establish sense of place very well, to my liking, they can never do it quite as well as videogames.
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[leoboiko]

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

Because video games will never:

Give you up
Let you down
Run around and desert you
Make you cry

Actually, Battle Arena Toshinden made me cry.

It's tough to understand since I'm not really a kid anymore, and I didn't really think about it as a kid.
The idea that came to mind was that video games weren't reality, so a lot more was possible in them. The actual draw was pulling those impossibilities into reality. That, I imagine is why I felt so compelled to build Homeworld-esk ships out of lego.
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[internisus]

leoboiko, thanks for your posts--you sort of reiterated my question as I did in fact mean it. However, I refuse to believe that the answer is simply that we are perpetually reenacting our childhoods or that we programmed ourselves at an early age to be ever-obsessed with this emerging form of media. It has to be some intrinsic characteristic of games or videogames, my intuition tells me. Or else we are all men-and-women-children. =(

Toups, WTF! You view Silent Hill as escapism? The original Silent Hill? That game is about GOD actively and aggressively trying to thwart and destroy you! Silent Hill, to me, is one of the most singularly interesting games ever made. In the first half of the game, you are confronted with impassable obstacles or exhausted searches at both the school and the hospital, and the unique paths that open to you (the puzzle-opened clocktower and the fourth-floor elevator button) represent interventions on the part of a higher power (the developer? the game's God?). The fact that taking these proffered routes allows access (spatially different in each of these two cases!) to new explorable territory at the cost of transforming the world into a nightmarish realm is utterly fascinating to me. It's a psychological spin on a gamist drive.

That the later game falls apart into emerging from buildings to find that the town has been reduced to a single, narrow catwalk is truly horrifying, because the impression is that the town or whatever power that provided a path for you before is not completely controlling your movements. It's just brilliant. This is why I will be calling back to Silent Hill for the rest of my life.

So how in the fuck in that kind of horror could you single out Silent Hill as an example of escapism?

[The New Ska]

i dunno. why do you like experiences?

dumb question, i think.

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

I never played Silent Hill, so I find it hard to figure out where all this is coming from.

Now, I don't know about you but I'm perpetually living out my childhood, but maybe I'm an isolated case. I don't know. What about Mass Effect, I hear that's suppost to tap into some sort of nostalgia.


Are games still about wonder?
I mean, what's the point of HDR and massive characters-on-screen counts when that wondrous amazement just isn't there?
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{V}_{^w^}_{V}

[haze]

because Sephiroth is so hot
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[Harveyjames]

It is because they are fun!

Protip: Don't play them too much though or it will stop being fun

If you find yourself playing and not having fun, stop playing
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[internisus]

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

Hey, why all the hatin?

Isn't there a grainy filter in mass effect that's suppost to emulate the look of 70's sci-fi television shows?
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[internisus]

Ha ha, yes, there is such a filter, but I am not aware of any particular intended throwback. I quite like it as it is, but it doesn't instill any nostalgia in me. Uh, maybe I've never watched a '70s sci-fi tv show.

My feelings on Mass Effect (PC) are a little mixed. Didn't really intend hatin', per se!
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Thinking about videogames.

[Mr. Toups]

[internisus]

[Mr. Toups]

God Hand is very unfriendly. It takes a lot of investment to really "get it". But once you do it's pretty much the best brawler ever.

Anyway... what's wrong with escapism?
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[spinach]

Problem solving, I've always thought, was the draw of the videogame. You play and you've got this limited set of verbs with which to perform tasks of ever increasing difficulty. It's growth, experienced in the first person even when it's in third person.

This isn't unique to videogames, either - adults often hold interest in sports, whether as spectators or participants.

[Max Cola]

Well, I find them fun. I can't tell you why you like them.

Not that I find all games fun, but I like some games which are not really "fun" (like Another World, for instance) because they do interesting stuff. I don't play games that I don't find fun or interesting.

I also find accomplishing goals in life satisfying, and most video games are about achieving some sort of goal, so there's that.

I play different types of games for different reasons, honestly. I like games about as much as any other media so it's not like there's any particular fixation on them for me.

You're just thinking too hard and trying to make yourself look less "juvenile" or something. Just chillax and enjoy the game.
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Everybody hurts sometimes

[internisus]

There's nothing wrong with escapism, and I didn't mean to say otherwise!

[shnozlak]

As a kid it was because I could go on an adventure. I adventured in the woods around the neighborhood too but in the neighborhood I had to go home when it got dark and I couldnt venture too far from home.

I think this why earthbound resounds with me so strongly. Basically, this is exactly what I wanted to happen to me when I was 8 years old.

And now that I'm 23 I don't think anything has changed. Now I have an old motorcycle and a gas budget. Video games are cheaper and less dangerous.
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Shnozlak, returns.

[charlie]

Because videogames allow us to explore rules and rule based systems safely from the confines of our own home. Or, to be more of a twat, let me say that human brains are inherently wired to solve problems in structured environments, exploring the rules that govern said environments, and how to exploit/break/use these rules to achieve some sort of goal. Videogames are very good at letting people do this without the drawbacks of real life physics/society/morality. In other words, videogames are like giant math problems, and we're all math geeks.

[somes]

I think the old art forms have failed us, or rather, we have failed them--they are too massive, too fractured for us to take a hold of.

Videogames are new and young. We can still understand them. They can still inspire wonder and engage the intellect, instead of suffocating us with the claustrophobia of history's encroachment, as the other arts do.

[spinach]

[glossolalia]

for three or four years in my mid-teens i actually quit playing videogames. i figured, and in retrospect this is such douchey teenagerthink, that since i wasn't into sports, videogames were just a dumping ground for my failed masculine competitive urges and as a budding artiste i should eliminate every element of that from my personality. (i was an insanely competitive person as a kid, and now i have a balanced view of it, so i'm glad to have experienced both extremes in the end, even if it was a stuck-up attitude that got me here.)

the story of how i changed my mind is long and boring and i don't want to bother articulating it so suffice to say it involved emulators and bored workdays, stumbling upon some good game blogs, and the wii. but i realized games don't have to fundamentally be about competition. for me, they're about learning and problem-solving, or an adrenaline rush, or like shnozlak the chance to go on the adventure i always wanted to.

it's not the opportunity for hard-earned achievement that entices me so much as the chance to explore and participate in a work to an extent that no other media allow.

somes, while i don't think older art forms have "failed" me in the least, the youth and potential and relative lack of snootiness surrounding videogames are another big reason i'm interested in them, and certainly the reason i'm on selectbutton. they're "our" medium, the way comics were for japanese baby boomers, or movies were for our great-grandparents.
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[leoboiko]

[GalaxyHead]

I've been curious to study people who are either retreatists or ritualists and seem to use video games as their platform for escapism. I knoq MMORPGs are a really hot topic in social research currently, but I am mainly interested in the pods of people who gather together in their 20s and do nothing except play video games, fight over video games, and discuss video games.

I mainly play video games when I am bored, or when a title is interesting enough. I really have never had any other reason to play them.

[somes]

[Dracko]

animu
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[WarpZone]

[vision]

to support the arts

[Elder Toups]

I don't know. I am pretty sure I hate video games. They really make me feel like I am wasting my time unless they engage me continuously and non-trivially. Games should make you work.

They should never, under any circumstances, make you press a button if it doesn't really matter if you press the button or not.

But like 90% of video games fail this simple test, and so I don't play much. To break this rule, you've got to offer me SUBSTANTIAL fantasy of some kind and even then, why not just watch a movie.
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Who dares limit our lifestyle?

[Dracko]

helps me pick up chicks
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[BalbanesBeoulve]

it's a fun thing to do.
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[Touran]

Well, I know why I used to like videogames. As a kid I would use them as a way to escape from reality - a way to help me forget about whatever shit was going down in my life. I can see how this trend continued up until a certain point where they moved into an obsession and I no longer was enjoying them.

At some point that stopped, and I enjoy them again. I have a pretty strong competitive spirit and videogames are one way to channel that, so that's at least one reason why I continue to care these pieces of code and plastic.

But I can say without a doubt that I first took an interest in videogames because they helped me deal with problems in my life.
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Man, I'm sorry.

[leoboiko]

[bruin]

[Gin]

I like videogames because of the completely uncharted psychological potential, that is the interaction between the player playing the game, and the designers who basically take the place of god in creating this limited world.

I think the fact that you can create a limited world is awesome, I want to make little limited reality like that, that holds up the illusion so high you can't see beyond it.

I like that life can be imitated with formulas, I like that one can experience choice and victory and defeat and frustration and talent through games. I like that a videogames exist as closed systems, and by playing them you can look into the hearts of the ones who made them, as gods of this little world, what happens there is necessarily a reflection of themselves.


People aren't ready yet though. They've had like wisps of a hint about doing things that are actuallly amazing, but at this point all I see I would say is impressive but not awe inspiring.


To me games appear as a woven tapestry of sound, sight and imagination.
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[vision]