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Why Gamers Can’t Be Politicians
As I’m forced to point out from time to time, nobody complains about hours wasted on recreation like watching sports (and reading about sports, and talking about sports, and dreaming …) or watching TV. Many responsible adults devote entire weekends to such activities but are not thought childish or lazy for it.
Affluence has enabled people to regain the abundant time for leisure that primitive hunters enjoyed before the rise of agrarian and industrial societies. In our society, video games are a normal activity of Generation X — respectable in moderation — but have yet to gain the respectability of being practiced by elders.
Yes, there remains a stigma, in some settings, against happily admitting one plays video games (or “interactive media,” as many developers prefer, to indicate the inclusion of serious themes). But that’s not why no avid gamer will be elected to high public office anytime soon.
The real reason is quotes like these, so easily misunderstood if pulled from an old Facebook or Twitter post by some unscrupulous campaign reporter and shared without context:
“I really need to stop driving over pedestrians.” (Watch Dogs, GTA, Saints Row)
“I’ve got a date tonight with a Big Daddy!” (Bioshock)
“I took his head off with my chainsaw!” (Gears of War, Dead Rising, Dying Light)
“I must have killed twenty sunflowers last night.” (Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare)
“Diablo is awesome!” (Diablo 3)
To our non-gamer friends: These aren’t quotes from games, but rather the sort of things gamers might say while playing those games. A Big Daddy, for example, is a particularly ominous enemy in the popular dystopian thriller Bioshock.
And yes, this post is thoroughly tongue-in-cheek. C’mon, fellow gamers! Add your own. What might you say in reference to a video game that could be damning if separated from its context? Be brave!
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P.S. The reason so many video games involve shooting and hitting things is because that’s much, much easier to simulate in fun and surprising ways than challenges that rely on language such s diplomacy and persuasion. Action gameplay is also less labor-intensive than conversation for developers to multiply into hours upon hours of content. Exploration-oriented gameplay is becoming more common now that emerging technologies have enabled easier, faster, and more compelling production of settings and experiences. And companies like Bioware have made considerable progress in streamlining production of conversation-based gameplay.
Published in Culture, Entertainment, General, Science & Technology, Technology
Wish some of my Ventrillo conversations with my World of Warcraft guild had been recorded …
“This woman was a blond when I killed her, but when I look in my bag, her head’s a brunette.”
“How many zebras do I have to kill to find four hooves?!”
Oh, fun games for the tadpoles if they get tired of Minecraft: Portal I and II. You have a “gun” but it creates holes in the walls/ ceiling/ floors for things to pass through, and most of the game is using the gun to put blocks on buttons in increasingly difficult puzzles. While being trashed talked by a computer.
Oh yes, they love portal, and myst, and tons of other cool games.
My two oldest play online together when the older is off at college. Of course, they also do that when they are sitting next to each other in the same room…
And now I’m imagining The Scarecrow playing Portal and getting really frustrated at the end when the puzzles give way to one. single. fight scene. If you got that far but then couldn’t finish the game how badly would that suck?
Portal is an excellent example of an intellectually challenging video game. It is what’s called an action puzzle game, because solving the puzzles requires not only a plan but successful execution of that plan. Portal challenges the player’s spatial reasoning. Here is a trailer for the original game.
Come to think of it, so does Ricochet.
“I’m not going to bed until I’ve sacked Paris.”
– Me, playing Civilization III some years ago.
Huzzah!
Claire (and anyone wanting to try video games for the first time),
Two game recommendations I think you’ll enjoy. First, google “Steam” and download it. Steam is the iTunes of video games- you can buy games within it, download them, and play them on your computer.
The two games are Civilization V and Portal. Both are a little older, so they’re frequently on sale. Portal, as mentioned above, is a first-person puzzle game. You wander your character through a maze of a scientific facility, trying to escape. Civilization V lets you control a civilization, from discovery of agriculture through space age (or world domination). There’s lots of good tutorials in-game.
I recommend both of these games because they’re not gory, fairly easy to learn, and not real-time online (you can pause whenever needed). Also, if you like history, it’s fun to play as various different civilizations, and take them in completely new directions (what if the Chinese had discovered ocean-crossing navigation? or been conquered by the Zulus?)
Yes, that is increasingly common.
The Xbox One console has a built-in DVR (the Playstation 4 has a similar feature). At any point during gameplay, simply say “Xbox, record that” and the Xbox will record the last 20-30 seconds. Or open the DVR app and have it record the past 5 minutes. That clip is then available for editing and sharing through another app.
Or gameplay can be streamed live, with or without commentary via a headset, through free services like Twitch. I have only done this a few times. There is an audience counter at the bottom of the broadcaster’s screen. The audience can communicate with the broadcaster through live chat, to which the broadcaster can respond either via chat or microphone. Voila, interactive TV!
Some games are more amenable to spectating than others. Watching a game of Civilization would be almost as boring as watching chess. I streamed a visually rich gladiator mode in Ryse: Son of Rome.
I generally prefer to share selected and edited clips of gameplay which are thrilling or funny. Here is one of fighter plane chase in Star Wars: Battlefront. Here is a custom paintjob I designed in Forza: Horizon 2. And here is my Far Cry 4 character riding an elephant, shooting pirates and a hostile rhino.
I can’t proceed past entry level at Ricochet. I’ve set everything on easy and I still die.
Crusader Kings 2 might be more your style.
Where else can restore the Roman Empire, mend the Great Schism (which, ironically enough, makes Catholics convert to Orthodoxy), and remove small children which are in the way of your glorious dynasty’s ascension.
Or if that’s not your thing, play as a Norseman, plundering the known world, or some Caliph subjugating the dying Byzantine Empire.
It will turn even the most politically correct into a sexist, imperialistic, anti semitic, nationalistic kinslayer.
But watch out for those damned Aztecs. They’ll surprise you when they invade Normandy.
I second the recommendation of Steam (even though I never use it anymore). Steam regularly offers awesome sales which include great games for as little as a few dollars. It offers free demos of many games in addition to full purchases. And it streamlines the installation process.
There are two major hurdles for new gamers.
One is complexity of controls. This isn’t a problem for every game, but 3D worlds which require simultaneous control of character movement and the camera tend to be overwhelming for newcomers. Portal might be difficult in this way, so perhaps it’s not the best entry-level game.
The second common barrier to enjoyment is lack of explanation. Many games these days include thorough tutorials to introduce controls and game rules. But many other games assume players start with some familiarity of the relevant genre. Also, game developers are not always aware of the knowledge and instincts that has been trained into them by decades of playing video games. For example: if I see an exclamation mark over a character or place, then as a veteran gamer I recognize that as a common method of identifying the beginning of a challenge proposal (often called “quests” or “missions”).
Claire, you might begin with Civilization: Revolution. Veterans of the genre often dismiss it as a watered down experience, but its design was deliberately streamlined for people new to such games (and people with no time for month-long campaigns). Conquer through war, diplomacy, economics, or culture.
Here is a brief sample from Mass Effect 2 (released 6 years ago) of Bioware trademark dialog gameplay. As Valiuth says, it’s essentially like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book. This is referred to as “branching dialog”, with each choice leading to a different set of other choices.
Note that after this particular player chooses the most aggressive options (action as well as words), one of his character’s companions comments on his choice. That is a key feature in interactive storytelling. Games put the player in control of many choices the protagonist makes, both moral and strategic. The developer can categorize the player’s choices in terms of right or wrong, lawful or chaotic, foolish or wise, and so on… without removing from the player that freedom to choose.
This is the advantage interactive media have over traditional storytelling mediums like books and films. Play is practice. That’s why wolf cubs and young boys wrestle. Pretending is a way to simulate possible future dilemmas and refine a response without the danger or expense of the real experience, so that one is prepared for the eventuality. Video games have the potential to be excellent tools in moral training because players aren’t idly wondering if they would have made the same choice that a story’s protagonist made; the player actually has to make that choice.
I’ve seen the future, brother, it is murder!
But that isn’t why grown men and grown wolves wrestle.
No, we do that for fun-
Love this game, but I don’t think it’s for new gamers. The tutorials are brief, and the complete open-game “do whatever you want, no guidance or stated goals” is very intimidating. But yes, it’s incredible, even (especially?) as it tends to turn into world-conquering, family-slaying, eugenics-for-offspring-selection simulator.
The guys behind Myst are at it again. (That’s the wikipedia entry, gateway to their main site seems to be offline at the moment.)
That paint job is pretty sick, Aaron! Also, in Battlefront, your blasters do more damage when you ease the throttle back. They don’t do a good job of explaining that.
Per your original point, I have found the same thing. When I play Battlefield: Hardline, a cops-and-robbers themed shooter game, I often record some proud feat of derring-do, only to realize that I’m playing the criminal faction and it’s basically footage of me shooting uniformed policemen. It’s an odd feeling.
One exception is here, and I can assure everyone that this is an entirely realistic portrayal of everyday police work.
Got to the third page of comments and was glad to see I wouldn’t be the first to mention Crusader Kings 2. I think it’s orientation towards dynasties (which can change geographical locations fairly easily) rather than countries sets it apart from other historical strategy games.
The Assassin’s Creed series had a lot of historical research go into it: the player character is fictional, but many of the NPCs (non-player characters) are real, as are the settings and some key events. In AC3, you can chat up Ben Franklin and he’ll tell you his views on mistresses…
By the way, individual gamers vary greatly in regard to sympathy with game characters… which is little different from sympathies with characters in novels. As many games become almost photo-realistic — in some cases, the characters are motion-captured and voiced by veteran Hollywood actors — game developers have become more successful in infusing their stories with compelling drama and serious themes.
But the vast majority of gamers will always distinguish clearly and instinctively between acceptable behavior in a game and acceptable behavior in reality. Tens of millions of people around the world enjoy First-Person Shooter (FPS) games. They love getting “headshots” and blowing their foes to smithereens. And then they return to work or family and behave no differently than any football fan.
If men get anything productive out of action movies, it’s probably just reinforcement of the instinct to defend their loved ones and values from criminals and malicious forces. Likewise, shooter-game players are generally just having fun. It’s not very productive, but it’s no worse than wasting one’s time and money at a casino gambling.
If Claire was experienced enough to handle the complex controls, she would probably love roaming around 18th-century Paris in Assassin’s Creed: Unity. The upcoming Hitman game will also include a Paris setting.
Do you know Col. Dave Grossman? Let me never tire of recommending his book, On killing. After a long book that’s really worth reading every page, he ends up in fear of action movies & violent video games. I kid you not–every liberal silliness under the pen of a man.
Or necessity. Or to display mastery or superiority.
Those may all reasons enough. Not sure we need to check those reasons against the educational value. An odd modern habit.
“Babe, I’m real tired. I’m going to go shoot people for a few hours, then go to sleep.”
Relatedly, my new laptop is up to BioShock Infinite, so I’m finally getting to play my wife’s Christmas present to me … from last year.
A friend of mine particularly liked to play as the Ottomans and then convert the province of Roma to Sunni Islam. It took a lot of doing.
It’s a very good book, but I found that the conclusion flowed from the premises, hence my concern. Why do you think it’s silly?
Lest this conversation become too serious, here’s my latest video capture: something I call fun with firetrucks. The game is Watch Dogs. The storyline is a serious drama about vigilante hackers and an omniscient surveillance state. But the gameplay leaves a lot of room for hilarity… like driving a firetruck up a narrow stairway to catch a criminal.
Your Civilization campaigns only take a month? Okay, it’s been a while since I played Civ so that might be the average length.
It still irks me when I’ve got alliances with all or most other nations and they attack me for no good reason, especially when (I was on an easier difficulty) I’ve got tanks and they’ve got musketeers.
I always enjoyed Negro Spiritual Night in TeamSpeak. Made Left4Dead runs more lively.