Just stop this nonsence,there's nothing wrong with violence.
Just stop this nonsence,there's nothing wrong with violence.
... I take the lives of a few to protect the lives of many. I commit acts of war to preserve the greater peace. I take no joy in killing, but make no mistake; I'll do what needs to be done. Because it's my job. It's my duty. My name is Sam Fisher, and I am a Splinter Cell.
Have you ever lived in a city? A realistic modern city in a video game at a 1:1 scale would be atrocious and boring. Sitting in traffic for an hour and only moving a quarter mile? Sounds fun! Buses showing up 20 minutes late? Fun. Miss your bus because for some reason it came early that day? FUN! Being robbed at gunpoint and then pistol whipped? Exciting! Sitting on the subway for an hour to travel across town? Exhilarating!
What would you even do in the city? Would you be able to enter every building? How would they pull that off? Randomly generated interiors that aren't accurate?
What if exactly those challenges became the central features of the game? Instead of a Skyrim-like arrow pointing you across the continent to an exact person in an exact location, you're given clues - a description of the target's favourite diner, his car model, periodic updates on his last known location - and it's up to you to sift through this info until you've got a lock on him.Originally Posted by NathanH
That could be a fun game. Biggest chore would be how long travelling'd take, but what if you were in control of not one character but a squad of agents that you could position around the city and then switch between for direct control as needed.
Last edited by Keep; 18-06-2012 at 02:11 PM.
Free speech don't mean unchallengeable speech.
So a detective game set in the Matrix where you are the agents? Hmm.
I'd play it.
Anyway I think this is a red herring. It's not believability that we want from our games, it's consistency. If death is cheap in the game, follow that logic through and apply that idea to the plot or to the world. Either make violence awful, or make it casual. Just don't straddle it by making the character angst over a death while simultaneously having the fuzz be stricter on traffic violations than murders.
Free speech don't mean unchallengeable speech.
Sometimes I think people read too much into things. I can understand their point of view relating to GTA4, but at the same time it's a GTA game. I enjoyed the story bits for what they were and the gameplay for what it was.
warning this post is kinda ot and rambly...
I'm in my early 30's and was never into videogames until my SO bought a wii (I think it was 4 years ago, but I'm terrible with dates).
The first game I played on it was Super Mario Galaxy and I thought it was genius. Because it was my first real interaction with videogames since my childhood/adolescence, I naively thought SMG was representative of the industry. It really got me into gaming, so much so I ended up buying a PS3 and a hefty PC in pursuit of that magic.
But when I look at my Steam library and my disc based console games I've kept, I realize just how little thought and resources go into the actual gameplay and mechanics in most games; and when I use the word 'games', I mean non-indie, non-niche games.
Most games just reuse well established gameplay elements, and then layer various story elements and/or chrome on top of them. Simulated violence as game mechanic is by far the most used, almost to the point of ubiquity. It is quite disheartening how little creativity this industry shows in comparison to say books/film/tv. It is also disheartening how little value is placed on gameplay by publishers, media, and gamers.
So what was it about SMG1 and later SMG2 that I found so enthralling. I guess it had to do with the fact that those two games got me into Flow.Flow is a pretty special feeling, and one worth replicating and seeking out. Unfortunately, for me, I just don't get it from most videogames. And one of the reasons for that is the overused simplified mechanics of games, of which simulated violence the poster child, bores me. Someone mentioned immersion. For me, immersion is another word for flow; and cutscenes, kill animations, and QTEs absolutely destroy immersion for me, all of which are found in abundance in sim-violence games.
Has my dabbling in this hobby over the last 3 or 4 years been worth it? In terms of achieving flow states, no. But I've had some fun, and I'm still keeping an eye out for games with that kind of potential but I'm not holding my breath.
In games with lots of pedestrians, like GTA or AssCreed, the NPCs spawn right next to you and disappear again when you look away. They're nothing but cardboard cutouts with pathing problems and a basic form of collision detection. One would think you'd want a bit more depth in your RPGs.
I don't really care about depth as long as I can KILL THEM ALL! Blood! RAAAGH!
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
I think it has more to do with you simply not liking action/shooter games than it does with all that stuff you said.
Mario Galaxy, while an enjoyable game, is no different from other genres in it's re-use of game mechanics. Yeah, it does something slightly different with the spherical worlds and such, but it's still just a platformer. At the end of the day you are just jumping around collecting coins and power-ups until you get from point A (the start of the level) to point B (the end of the level). Mechanically it's very similar to every other platform game.
Concluding that there is something wrong with a genre (or even the whole industry) simply because you don't particularly like what is currently popular is erroneous.
True, and it was me who brought up GTA as an example of unrealistic but I'm not actually saying GTA shoulda been a different game.
TV tropes is all over this thread, but there's a thing they talk about called fridge logic - that moment when you're outside the game or movie, and suddenly you think "Hey wait a minute. Why the hell did...?"
It doesn't affect you while you're in it. It's only afterward it comes up. And if it's something that really makes no sense, well that's lame. Things should make sense whether you're inside them our outside.
But worse again is if the fridge logic isn't just something specific to the one game/movie/book that made it come up but something more general. Because then, the next game/movie/book you give yourself over to, it'll do it as well and then you can't help but be pushed outside it. "There's that makes-no-sense thing again! Oh wait, because this is just a game. Oh look, I'm not in the game anymore."
It's not because I like reading into things that I talk about them. It's because they interfere with my ability to just get on with the game and enjoy myself.
Free speech don't mean unchallengeable speech.
I guess that's what I find baffling: that people who play a lot of games aren't comfortable with realizing when playing games that they're playing games.
Irrelevant on further examination of the rest of the thread.
Yeah, I don't know if that completely applies to GTA though. The human psyche is complicated and Niko's actions can kind of be explained away by various disorders such as PTSD.
Anyway, I do agree with your overall point. If I am watching a movie and it's just unbelievably stupid I cannot continue to watch it. The most recent example I can think of was the movie 2012. It was on cable so I figured "what the hell" and watched it for about 45 minutes. Every single thing that happened in those 45 minutes didn't just cross the line of suspending disbelief, it completely destroyed the line. Things like a single engine prop plane surviving contact with a cloud of super heated volcanic ash that literally wiped entire cities off the face of the Earth. Or an RV being hit by a flying half-molten boulder that was ejected by a volcano and continuing to drive away safely, only having it's rear door knocked off.
Last edited by Hypernetic; 18-06-2012 at 02:48 PM.
Because it makes me realise "Shit man I'm wasting my time here, I've been playing this for nearly two hours! Still haven't done my laundry yet. Hm do I have a clean shirt to wear this weekend if I don't do the laundry? Oh yeah gotta remember to pay that bill before Friday. Jeez there are more important things to do with myself than play this game - and it doesn't even make sense! What the hell!"
Free speech don't mean unchallengeable speech.
I just want more variety in my diet. Sure there are puzzlers, platformers, gardening simulators, and management games which have no violence whatsoever, but they're massively outnumbered. Violence is our number 1 form of interaction in games by a laughably huge margin. Shouldn't there be more to this? Can't we explore all manner of social issues and philosophy without having to choke a bitch?
Have you ever opened a history book?
(Hint: the answer to your question is no.)
I recently watched the first half of We Bought a Zoo and, even though it's based off a true story, the dialogue in the movie was ridiculous. If Scarlet Johannson's character wasn't played by Scarlet Johannson, she would have been absolutely unwatchable: Watching as a benefactor comes in and saves her pet project from the chopping block, she does nothing but castigate him and call him a fraud while he goes bankrupt spending all his money keeping her shit aloft.
I kept thinking, "somebody needs to slap this person," but not me, because she's too pretty to bruise.
I find myself getting warm fuzzy feelings running around Steelport and giving compliments to people - especially when they're wearing Saints merchandise.
My History Channel education is almost as good.
What an odd thing to say. There have been works exploring deep things through the prism of combat (the Illiad, for example) forever, but there have also been works doing exactly that through many other elements (anything featuring Socrates, all the pastorals ever, that sort of thing). Violence is key to some of this, but so is an absence of violence, and the latter is often under-represented in gaming. Discussing that is entirely worthwhile.
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