:: gaming
Take a note!
Oh wait, I take my own notes. I need to hire a secretary.
I'm postponing a paper I have to write this evening to rant on Livejournal, and I'm going to rant about a surprisingly unlikely topic. That being said, I'm going to rant about video games for the better part of two pages. If you have absolutely no interest in video games, you still might enjoy this. If you're completely opposed to them on some moral level, then maybe you should look away.
There is an extent at which you can accurately judge the collective desires/intelligence of a contemporary culture by looking at their artifacts. Unlike cultures of the past, our artifacts are technological in nature and operate in complex ways, unforeseen in times past. Not to say that the content of our entertainment is of more worth than other cultures or past cultures, because frankly, it isn't.
A lot of people will blame MTV and various other outlets of "entertainment" for dumbing down the audience or essentially "telling us what we want" and manufacturing a need. This is true on a level, but on an even greater level, we control such agencies and they are simply supplying demand. Of course there are times when these agencies guide our interests and stimulate our desires, but by and large, the overwhelming majority of people are the ones that actively seek out these forms of entertainment and it is not MTV's desire, or Fox's desire, or Hollywood's desire that the majority of entertainment be necessarily stupid. We demand stupid, because collectively, the average person is stupid. If you're intelligent and find time in your day/week/month to enjoy an episode of "Jackass" it doesn't speak much about you as a person, but if that kind of entertainment is the epitome of all that you seek and desire for stimulation, than as a whole person, you are stupid. And it follows that many people are stupid, our popular media is a testament to it.
Moving on. Video games are extremely recent. I started with Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake et cetera in the early 1990s (before I was even 10) and became hooked. It was a constant battle back and forth with my parents for the next ten years, as apparently, killing Nazis/monters/aliens/zombies on a computer screen isn't very good for someone whose mind is still growing mentally. They were probably right. After a decade of fighting it, I eventually gave up on one of my past times only to resurrect it last year when I purchased an Xbox then eventually an Xbox 360.
Of course my tastes have changed quite a bit, but my love for interactive entertainment has unwavered. People will deploy a vast amount of arguments against video games such as the fact that they kill brain cells, they're morally questionable (thank you Hilary Clinton and Rockstar Games), they encourage bad tendencies in impressionable minds, et cetera. I wonder how many people questionning the value of video games have actually sat down and played through a recent one. Though I have a moral problem with some games (games that include things like murdering other cognizant, sometimes innocent, human beings in a realistic context), the large majority of video games are fine by me.
Unlike television, interactive entertainment is exactly that. Interactive. When video games entered the third dimension in the last ten years, they began to take forms that resembled the real world. You essentially have to think as you would have to in the real world, in a virtual world, where the laws of gravity (or just the law in general), might be different, but in concept, it is at least believable. Interacting with entertainment is a step beyond absorbing passive entertainment. It's somewhere between watching your favourite Daily Show episode and reading a book. There are intensively visual queues, taking away from the whole imagination aspect, but the paths in which you must construct in order to solve real time problems in the gameworld can be extremely beneficial in how you process information about the real world, depending on the complexity of games you play. I think that psychologically, I have benefited more from games than I have lost.
Forcing yourself into complex, challenging and dynamic situations for entertainment's sake basically forces you to learn new styles of thinking and cognitive adaption. Especially when you play "multiplayer" games, which consist of working in environment with multiple non-AI friends and foes. In any setting where the goal is to quickly devise strategies that out-think and out-react other people, you gain something advantageous to your mental awareness. Many important psychologists and psychiatrists have been turning around in the past little while to this fact as well, and many intelligent gamers would accuse Hilary Clinton and her compatriots of being "dinosaurs"--and for good reasons (which doesn't make the Grant Theft Auto games any less sick and despisable).
The stronger reason underlying why I play games is not so much what they are now, but where they are going. Thanks to huge advances in graphics and artificial intelligence--especially with the most recent generation of consoles--games have taken a turn into strangely non game-like territories. The example I will use is the game I'm currently pissing my pants for, from a Canadian company called "Bioware", titled "Mass Effect". In the game, you have to make hundreds of moral decisions, varying in importance, that will ultimately effect how mankind will be percieved in a massive virtual universe throughout the course of the game. Yes, moral decisions, in real time, and not tied to any arbitrary point system but to the human heart. That's just the beginning.
The more AI develops, the more immersive games become, the more games of this nature we will see. I have been somewhat disappointed in this generation's games because in a grab for much needed funds (some gaming systems sell at a price less than what it cost to make), game manufactures have released a plethora of games targeted to the masses that can generate the most revenue possible. These games can be offensively stupid, yet even at this level, I argue that the worst video games are still better than the best television (if a responsible adult is playing them to say the least).
The kind of games I'm interested in and am referring to are niche market games, which won't exist until the gaming industry first has the revenue and then solidifies itself; letting smaller, third party ventures in (and subsequently funding them, as Microsoft is doing with Mass Effect and the makers of "System Shock" are doing with Bioshock later this year). The gaming industry's tone has shifted a lot with this generation. You can tell it is with a bit of bitterness that they refer to games as "games", and when they market these "games", they market them more as "products" or "time investments" than they do as interactive stories. That does not mean they believe people are automatons that eat up anything they shit out, but it implies that it is now unwise to advertise games as providing X, Y and Z experiences when every person who plays a game has a different and unpredictable experience. That exponentially increases, of course, with non-linear games, especially Massively Multiplayer ones. There are fewer and fewer games and more and more worlds, the artists behind them (are video games art?) merely create a setting or a place, you (and your buddies) fill in the rest.
If I ever have the misfortune of excreting a child-unit, I'm going to have no problem with them playing games a few hours after their bedtime. So long as they are within good taste and can make a distinction between "in there" and "out here".
Oh wait, I take my own notes. I need to hire a secretary.
I'm postponing a paper I have to write this evening to rant on Livejournal, and I'm going to rant about a surprisingly unlikely topic. That being said, I'm going to rant about video games for the better part of two pages. If you have absolutely no interest in video games, you still might enjoy this. If you're completely opposed to them on some moral level, then maybe you should look away.
There is an extent at which you can accurately judge the collective desires/intelligence of a contemporary culture by looking at their artifacts. Unlike cultures of the past, our artifacts are technological in nature and operate in complex ways, unforeseen in times past. Not to say that the content of our entertainment is of more worth than other cultures or past cultures, because frankly, it isn't.
A lot of people will blame MTV and various other outlets of "entertainment" for dumbing down the audience or essentially "telling us what we want" and manufacturing a need. This is true on a level, but on an even greater level, we control such agencies and they are simply supplying demand. Of course there are times when these agencies guide our interests and stimulate our desires, but by and large, the overwhelming majority of people are the ones that actively seek out these forms of entertainment and it is not MTV's desire, or Fox's desire, or Hollywood's desire that the majority of entertainment be necessarily stupid. We demand stupid, because collectively, the average person is stupid. If you're intelligent and find time in your day/week/month to enjoy an episode of "Jackass" it doesn't speak much about you as a person, but if that kind of entertainment is the epitome of all that you seek and desire for stimulation, than as a whole person, you are stupid. And it follows that many people are stupid, our popular media is a testament to it.
Moving on. Video games are extremely recent. I started with Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake et cetera in the early 1990s (before I was even 10) and became hooked. It was a constant battle back and forth with my parents for the next ten years, as apparently, killing Nazis/monters/aliens/zombies on a computer screen isn't very good for someone whose mind is still growing mentally. They were probably right. After a decade of fighting it, I eventually gave up on one of my past times only to resurrect it last year when I purchased an Xbox then eventually an Xbox 360.
Of course my tastes have changed quite a bit, but my love for interactive entertainment has unwavered. People will deploy a vast amount of arguments against video games such as the fact that they kill brain cells, they're morally questionable (thank you Hilary Clinton and Rockstar Games), they encourage bad tendencies in impressionable minds, et cetera. I wonder how many people questionning the value of video games have actually sat down and played through a recent one. Though I have a moral problem with some games (games that include things like murdering other cognizant, sometimes innocent, human beings in a realistic context), the large majority of video games are fine by me.
Unlike television, interactive entertainment is exactly that. Interactive. When video games entered the third dimension in the last ten years, they began to take forms that resembled the real world. You essentially have to think as you would have to in the real world, in a virtual world, where the laws of gravity (or just the law in general), might be different, but in concept, it is at least believable. Interacting with entertainment is a step beyond absorbing passive entertainment. It's somewhere between watching your favourite Daily Show episode and reading a book. There are intensively visual queues, taking away from the whole imagination aspect, but the paths in which you must construct in order to solve real time problems in the gameworld can be extremely beneficial in how you process information about the real world, depending on the complexity of games you play. I think that psychologically, I have benefited more from games than I have lost.
Forcing yourself into complex, challenging and dynamic situations for entertainment's sake basically forces you to learn new styles of thinking and cognitive adaption. Especially when you play "multiplayer" games, which consist of working in environment with multiple non-AI friends and foes. In any setting where the goal is to quickly devise strategies that out-think and out-react other people, you gain something advantageous to your mental awareness. Many important psychologists and psychiatrists have been turning around in the past little while to this fact as well, and many intelligent gamers would accuse Hilary Clinton and her compatriots of being "dinosaurs"--and for good reasons (which doesn't make the Grant Theft Auto games any less sick and despisable).
The stronger reason underlying why I play games is not so much what they are now, but where they are going. Thanks to huge advances in graphics and artificial intelligence--especially with the most recent generation of consoles--games have taken a turn into strangely non game-like territories. The example I will use is the game I'm currently pissing my pants for, from a Canadian company called "Bioware", titled "Mass Effect". In the game, you have to make hundreds of moral decisions, varying in importance, that will ultimately effect how mankind will be percieved in a massive virtual universe throughout the course of the game. Yes, moral decisions, in real time, and not tied to any arbitrary point system but to the human heart. That's just the beginning.
The more AI develops, the more immersive games become, the more games of this nature we will see. I have been somewhat disappointed in this generation's games because in a grab for much needed funds (some gaming systems sell at a price less than what it cost to make), game manufactures have released a plethora of games targeted to the masses that can generate the most revenue possible. These games can be offensively stupid, yet even at this level, I argue that the worst video games are still better than the best television (if a responsible adult is playing them to say the least).
The kind of games I'm interested in and am referring to are niche market games, which won't exist until the gaming industry first has the revenue and then solidifies itself; letting smaller, third party ventures in (and subsequently funding them, as Microsoft is doing with Mass Effect and the makers of "System Shock" are doing with Bioshock later this year). The gaming industry's tone has shifted a lot with this generation. You can tell it is with a bit of bitterness that they refer to games as "games", and when they market these "games", they market them more as "products" or "time investments" than they do as interactive stories. That does not mean they believe people are automatons that eat up anything they shit out, but it implies that it is now unwise to advertise games as providing X, Y and Z experiences when every person who plays a game has a different and unpredictable experience. That exponentially increases, of course, with non-linear games, especially Massively Multiplayer ones. There are fewer and fewer games and more and more worlds, the artists behind them (are video games art?) merely create a setting or a place, you (and your buddies) fill in the rest.
If I ever have the misfortune of excreting a child-unit, I'm going to have no problem with them playing games a few hours after their bedtime. So long as they are within good taste and can make a distinction between "in there" and "out here".