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by _delirium
4885 days ago
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I guess that part I just don't agree with. I feel much more immersed in novels than in games, myself. Games are just escapist entertainment, whereas novels have changed my worldview, stuck with me for years, and made me feel I was there. I can't think of a game that has been more than entertainment for me, and I've played quite a few also. Heck, even in sci-fi situations, Ender's Game felt much more immersive than Doom. All that stuff about "demons from hell" and "being on Mars" in Doom I just saw as sort of silly skin on top of what's fundamentally some abstract gameplay. And it's hard to take the skins of Counterstrike or CoD any more seriously than that. More to the point, though, the scientific evidence that games change behavior more than other media just isn't very compelling, despite lots of money spent trying to prove it (some of it in the positive direction, as people with "serious games" grants try to prove that games are uniquely positioned to enact positive behavior change). |
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Compare a video game - you kill an NPC, scoop up some loot, scrounge around breaking all their crates and pots, then move on. Not thinking about it, not caring what it is you're doing or what it means to loot a body or take the pathetic remains of some poor wretch's miserable existance. Ha! This gun is way worse than the one I'm wielding! Throw it in the trash, or keep it to sell for coin.
Clearly they are very different experiences. You can't tell me killing innocent bystanders, looting strangers' homes, fencing stolen goods not once but 10,000 times to get to the final level - none of this penetrates, not even a little? You mention Doom which is disengenious - that was riveting when it came out because of the tension, the surprises. But we're way past that now. Now we hear the screams of carefully simulated civilians, see their blood, then loot their wallets and cars.
Why? What moron thinks this is entertainment? It substitutes shock for any scrap of intelligent gameplay, until it becomes meaningless. Until its just abstract gameplay.
Anyway maybe I'm off the mark here. But until we admit that something is going on here that's different from a book or movie, we've not begun to figure out whether it matters.