People take video games way, way too seriously for what they were proposed as.
Fun, and entertaining. Now everyone gets hassled or offended at the slightest thing that may be a joke toward their transkin otterkin, pansexual, fathealth self.
[QUOTE=Covalent;47841117]People take video games way, way too seriously for what they were proposed as.
Fun, and entertaining. Now everyone gets hassled or offended at the slightest thing that may be a joke toward their transkin otterkin, pansexual, fathealth self.[/QUOTE]
Idk, if games may make people flip out in joy or provoke genuine thought, they should also be able to create negative responses. As long as you don't lose sight of facts and reality and basic respect towards other human beings because of whatever the game invokes, good or bad, I'm fine with it.
One of the most oddly poignant things I can think of where a game made me kill somebody was from Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The part where you're going through the cistern and you have to raise the water level in order to progress, you can hear somebody trapped in a chamber, and when you finish the area and you get all three valves turned, it just stops. I didn't even catch what happened my first playthrough, as I have really bad aquaphobia in video games.
So while I do agree that the best way for a character's death in a video game to impact somebody is to give them a story and a "face" or persona, it takes a lot of talent to accomplish the same thing with an anonymous casualty.
Kinda off-topic, but I really hope that Frictional's upcoming title SOMA is going to really make people think about how we empathize. And if anyone can do it, its them, because the ending of Penumbra 2 still haunts me.
[QUOTE=Covalent;47841117]People take video games way, way too seriously for what they were proposed as.
Fun, and entertaining. Now everyone gets hassled or offended at the slightest thing that may be a joke toward their transkin otterkin, pansexual, fathealth self.[/QUOTE]
I don't think its seriousness. We just don't know how to approach them correctly yet besides what they've been for 30+ years. A toy, it was only really from the SNES forward we started seeing real stories and even then the highest selling games of the time were arcadey.
[editline]30th May 2015[/editline]
Film had a similar issue, but instead was used for pornography instead.
Investment can be key in terms of feeling something about an enemy. You don't know the innocent pedestrians and law enforcement and national guard in Hatred, none of them have any real personality beyond generic barks as far as I've seen, and I don't think it even has any actual bosses or "antagonists" that give any sort of character to the game.
An example of investment in characters, namely villains, comes from the recent Wolfenstein game, The Old Blood. This will spoil it a great deal of it for folks who haven't played it yet, but hey, that's what the tags are for. First on the block, we have Rudi Jäger, the Warden of the Den of Wolves in Castle Wolfenstein. Over the course of the first act, you see his brutal actions firsthand, [sp]see him torture your comrade to death[/sp], see his love for his dogs (specifically Greta), and at the very start even share a laugh with him while you're still undercover. When you [sp]escape the electric torture chair[/sp], you [sp]kill Greta in retribution for your comrade[/sp], which he does not take well. Later, after escaping the castle and arriving at the nearby village, you are confronted by him yet again, and he is PISSED OFF and [sp]wearing experimental mech armour as you fight him in the tavern[/sp]. As the two of you fight, he [sp]laments the loss of his beloved Greta, and calls you a brutish monster[/sp], and you can not only feel but hear his pain as he yells at you, right to the bitter end when you finally take him down.
Secondly, we have Helga Von Schabbs, who is driven by her desire to discover and explore, a passion she had since childhood. Her youthful expeditions were more or less brought to an end when she was affected by polio, causing one of her legs to wither away. She relates how she suffered and even cried, but adds that she did not let it dampen her spirit or hurt her desire to explore the world and discover its secrets, which comes across as rather inspiring even considering the fact that she's a high-ranking Nazi under the command of the nefarious Wilhelm "Deathshead" Strasse. In [sp]the grim flamey catacombs beneath Wulfburg[/sp], you can tell that she is quite happy as she [sp]finds the entrance to the cavern holding a powerful weapon devised to ensure King Otto's supremacy[/sp], and even when she comes face to face with the monstrous [sp]golem beast[/sp], she does not seem disgusted or repulsed, even [sp]stroking the golem beast's face[/sp] as it appears non-hostile. It doesn't last long however, since [sp]both Helga and her "supervisor" Emmerich get absolutely pulverized by the golem beast[/sp], leaving Blazko to clean up the mess.
And finally we have the final boss of The Old Blood, the [sp]Monstrosity aka golem beast[/sp]. On the surface at first glance, it seems like your average [sp]brutish colossus that smashes and swings its fists in your general direction[/sp], but take a moment to stand in silence and you'll see that [sp]it doesn't attack unless something makes a loud noise[/sp]. As a matter of fact, [sp]the beast has no eyes whatsoever, and if not for the Nazis seeking to make use of it in the war, one could in theory have just let it be and leave it to its immortal solitude.[/sp] Through reading old documents throughout the game. you learn that [sp]King Otto I got his hands on some old scrolls, and was able to create advanced weapons of war, with one of the greatest being the Monstrosity. However, the Monstrosity was deemed too abominable to possibly march onto the battlefield and was instead sealed away forever, with more or less all evidence of the experiments in ancient Wulfburg being burned away, along with the entire town. And at certain points in Blazko's fight against the Monstrosity, it will clasp it's head as if trying to cover its ears and generally look as if it's trying to say "Make it stop!", implying that while it cannot see, it has very good hearing and cannot abide an overabundance of loud noises, whilst also giving an impression that it just wants to be left alone.[/sp] Sadly its wish cannot be fulfilled, and Blazko puts it out of its misery.
To conclude, generally you care more about a character and are more likely to feel something for them as you learn more about them and know why they are doing what they are doing. With the vast majority of cookie-cutter opponents in games, even ones as passive as the civilians in Hatred, you just don't get any connections or investment for them since they're usually just throwaway one-dimensional cannon-fodder that you encounter by the buttload. When it comes to investment, close allies and bosses usually have the largest potential for investment depending on how they are handled.
To elaborate, I feel that it helps if your relationship with an adversary or any character feels more genuine and authentic the more time you are associated with them, since if you encounter some guy before you get to know them, you have a great deal less investment in them than if you were in contact with them, or at least have heard/read about them, over the course of a level, several levels, or even the entire game in some cases. Gruntilda the Witch, Handsome Jack, and Pagan Min are examples of having a final boss whom you are in contact with throughout the game, as all three of them contact you during the main story, usually to taunt you, boast about their greatness, or in Pagan's case even try to have a little banter. This builds your relationship with these villainous bounders, mostly contempt and animosity, and when you finally encounter them all that association and learning about the characters pays off as you deal with them at long last, though in Pagan's case you learn about him and his backstory through the lore books and diary entries you find, and you end up discovering what caused him to end up the way he is.
So yeah, investment is key to making people give a shit about a mass of programmed polygons. Even the goddamned Companion Cube from Portal, an inanimate (supposedly) metal cube with hearts painted on it, gives you some sense of connection as it helps you deal with the puzzles in that stage, makes you glad that it was there to help you out and feel that you couldn't have passed the test without it. And at the end of the test, you are forced to dispose of the poor blighter after all you'd gone through together, giving a sense (however small) of missing something that you had grown invested in. I would say it's as simple as that, but there are a lot of variables for making sure that the character investment was both of good quality and above all else memorable.
I recently played a game called One Way Heroics and found myself with a tough choice. I was on a quest to save the world from a demon lord but didn't have the equipment to do it. The evil monsters terrorizing the countryside didn't drop enough gold and I was having bad luck with dungeons so I found myself resorting to looting towns and killing innocent creatures. I got rich and saved the world but it was quite fucked.
[QUOTE=Covalent;47841117]People take video games way, way too seriously for what they were proposed as.[/QUOTE]
Nothing wrong with taking games seriously. Honestly, these "games are art people" have no respect for games as an artistic medium. You will almost never see these people advocating for the censorship of films or pointing at a violent films and declaring that they shouldn't exist. Hell, half of them don't even respect the gameplay aspect of games and just want games to be films.
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;47841945]Nothing wrong with taking games seriously. Honestly, these "games are art people" have no respect for games as an artistic medium. You will almost never see these people advocating for the censorship of films or pointing at a violent films and declaring that they shouldn't exist. Hell, half of them don't even respect the gameplay aspect of games and just want games to be films.[/QUOTE]
To me, games are an artform, but they're not JUST an artform. They are a form of entertainment as well, plus the development of them is also a business, and when you're like me and have a fixation with mechanics, game design is a science too. It's not just a matter of having a mechanic in a game because it's awesum, it's also a matter of tweaking the mechanics so they work right and work in tandem with other mechanics.
For instance when you're playing a shooter the guns feel tend to feel better if they have a good kick and a good punch, so it feels powerful in your hands and the effects LOOK powerful against your target. If an enemy is damage-spongy and keeps on coming, it makes your guns feel weak and poor, and makes fighting said enemy feel like a chore. This is often the case with Borderlands in multiplayer, where the health of enemies scales with the number of players, meaning everything becomes a stodgy spongy chore. However, if the guns had more impact in their shot, causing at least a good stagger and at best send the bastards flying backwards, your guns feel powerful even if the damage technically stays the same, plus the effect of slapping them around and impairing their movement gives a satisfying sense of crowd control and power over the enemy. It is a lesson that Borderlands should probably take to heart, as well as a lesson that Iron Brigade shoulda followed, since in general its weapons in general tend to briefly stagger the Monovisions at best, whereas ideally the big guns should be able to cause the target to stumble for a few seconds or even go flying, which would sound OP if it were not for the fact that there are a metric fuckton of those biomechanical telly-brained nightmares moving down the lanes towards the buildings you're trying to protect.
I'm just in one of those moods tonight where I feel I have relevant things that I can talk a fair bit about.
[QUOTE=Covalent;47841117]People take video games way, way too seriously for what they were proposed as.
Fun, and entertaining. Now everyone gets hassled or offended at the slightest thing that may be a joke toward their transkin otterkin, pansexual, fathealth self.[/QUOTE]
Games as a whole, or just some? Because frankly, I'd you're saying we shouldn't let games provoke emotion, tell a powerful story and provide allegorical criticism of current events you're just being flat-out dumb. But if you're saying that some games are, at every level, just mindless fun, yeah you're right. Just some aren't too. I took the Mass Effect series story and characters seriously, sue me.
How seriously we take a piece of media/art should be about the content not the form of it.
[editline]31st May 2015[/editline]
Also, where the fuck does all this otherkin stuff come into violence in video games?
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;47841945]
Nothing wrong with taking games seriously. Honestly, these "games are art people" have no respect for games as an artistic medium. You will almost never see these people advocating for the censorship of films or pointing at a violent films and declaring that they shouldn't exist. Hell, half of them don't even respect the gameplay aspect of games and just want games to be films.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, right now game developers have too many producers who feel making games is somehow a stepping stone into Hollywood (how?), or wouldn't cut it in the film industry and see games as being just a step down from film. These sorts of people have no respect for games as a medium and you can often tell by looking at the games they produce. A lot of indie schlock falls into this, but thankfully there are more and more indies who just want to make good games.
The same can be said for journalists and bloggers who want to be writing about something and want games to be their stepping stone to writing for something 'better'. Often they'll hold cinema and television above games as some form of goal developers should aim for, so they criticise games that aren't like TV or film for doing things TV and film do all the time just because games do it differently.
Unlike any other form of media games have the ability to place players in uncomfortable situations, which is a very important thing I think. I'm currently playing The Witcher 3 and, like I did in the first two games, I'm trying to remain neutral. Often this means I have to ignore terrible things happening all around me because being a witcher doesn't mean being a hero. I often fail at it too, there are times where I'll do something good like save a person from bandits and I walk away from the situation upset with myself. I saved a person but to do it I had to break my personal code. I feel bad when I let bad things happen because I can help and it isn't that much of an inconvenience, I feel bad when I don't let bad things happen because I'm failing to follow the very clear rules Geralt set out for himself. Film can't make you conflicted like that, TV and books can't make you feel personally responsible for your actions.
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;47842082]Film can't make you conflicted like that, TV and books can't make you feel personally responsible for your actions.[/QUOTE]
I feel like this is the best choice
[QUOTE]civil war and tyranny ensues[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;47842082]Unlike any other form of media games have the ability to place players in uncomfortable situations, which is a very important thing I think. I'm currently playing The Witcher 3 and, like I did in the first two games, I'm trying to remain neutral. Often this means I have to ignore terrible things happening all around me because being a witcher doesn't mean being a hero. I often fail at it too, there are times where I'll do something good like save a person from bandits and I walk away from the situation upset with myself. I saved a person but to do it I had to break my personal code. I feel bad when I let bad things happen because I can help and it isn't that much of an inconvenience, I feel bad when I don't let bad things happen because I'm failing to follow the very clear rules Geralt set out for himself. Film can't make you conflicted like that, TV and books can't make you feel personally responsible for your actions.[/QUOTE]
And the main reason why that is why it is is because unlike the vast majority of media varieties, video games is one of very few mediums where you actively participate and have control, or at least a say, in what happens. There are other forms of media where you have at least tangential influence, such as certain forms of theatre where audience participation occurs (Whose Line Is It Anyway? is like this during some of the games they play), sports, choose-your-own-adventure books, and even posting on forums like we are now. But the interaction and participation surrounding such things often pale in significance to the amount of involvement and agency you have in video games because, for the greater whole of the experience, you are in control.
You can control what you see, where you go, what you do, whereas with books, regular theatre, music, films and videos you adopt a very passive stance as you watch things happen in a predestined passive progression. Since your actions are having an effect in the world of the game, you are engaged in the experience and can feel things more strongly than if you just watched things happen. That's why we care about games so much, because doing things makes us feel like we're making things happen, rather than things just happening, and there is the potential for us to choose. And that's the beauty of the medium.
[QUOTE=Rangergxi;47841945]I recently played a game called One Way Heroics and found myself with a tough choice. I was on a quest to save the world from a demon lord but didn't have the equipment to do it. The evil monsters terrorizing the countryside didn't drop enough gold and I was having bad luck with dungeons so I found myself resorting to looting towns and killing innocent creatures. I got rich and saved the world but it was quite fucked.
Nothing wrong with taking games seriously. Honestly, these "games are art people" have no respect for games as an artistic medium. You will almost never see these people advocating for the censorship of films or pointing at a violent films and declaring that they shouldn't exist. Hell, half of them don't even respect the gameplay aspect of games and just want games to be films.[/QUOTE]
Paradox games are really great about things like that. After a while you just sort of sit back and think, "500,000 people just died fighting over a rock", then with EU4 there's a lot of existential questions about what happens when you press the replace culture button.
[QUOTE=Nikota;47842323]Paradox games are really great about things like that. After a while you just sort of sit back and think, "500,000 people just died fighting over a rock", then with EU4 there's a lot of existential questions about what happens when you press the replace culture button.[/QUOTE]
Or Crusader Kings II when you castrate your son, assassinate your uncle, have sex with your mom and your sisters, and then get executed by your best friend.
Or is that not thought provoking enough, idk
People get offended way too easily
[QUOTE=MrHeadHopper;47842402]People get offended way too easily[/QUOTE]
Internet gives people easy access to all the tools needed to be offended and get noticed about that.
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