Flaen

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22 year-old female from Earth...-ish. Sorta.
I like pie.

Latest Post

Flaen

Embracing Escapism
Before I dive in to this post, I need to make a little confession.
Every time I write a gaming-related article in this blog, I can't help but assess its potential for use at work. In fact I've already pinched one article and thrown it into my work blog. Of course I had to edit it to get rid of the cussing and localize it a bit but the bulk of the post is undeniably there.

The truth will set you free!! Though if my jail cell had an internet connection, and XBox 360 and my laptop, its debatable as to whether I'd want to leave.

Anyway, down to this post proper.

I read an article awhile back on how video games getting more and more realistic might not necessarily be a good thing. (Uh, it might have been from IndustryGamers. I love those guys, have I already mentioned that?) At the time, I had a choice between playing Dragonica (a f2p MMO in it's beta stage which will run on just about any half-decent computer) and Grand Theft Auto IV (highly acclaimed sandbox-style game which gathered it's fair share of pop culture references and controversy and runs on my $700 XBox 360). My choice ended up being spending the next week grinding levels on my thief. Then my brother started playing and I happily abandoned that level 23 character to start from scratch on a different server. I still haven't gotten more than two hours or so of gameplay out of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Of course there are a lot of factors in this equation. Firstly, there's the difference between console and laptop (fine, PC) games. My XBox 360 requires me to hog the TV and tends to chase the rest of my family upstairs because of the noise and lack of TV for them. Now I actually like my family and between school and work, I don't see them as much as I'd like. So coming home and ignoring them in favour of playing on my XBox seems kind of mean. With a less-demanding MMO, I can play wherever in the house the rest of the family is hanging out and even make a bit of conversation since Asia MMOs tend to be less intense. Second is the whole 'interact with other humans' thing. It's nice to know there's someone on the other end of the line when I play. And unlike XBL, it's text-based communication which means I don't have to give it all my attention. Then there's also the fact that by and large, the players you meet on Asian MMOs just aren't as much douchebags as there tend to be in Western gaming communities. I don't know why this is so but it is. It doesn't mean there aren't scammers and jerks in Asian MMOs but rather the norm is when someone does something stupid, you just ignore them. A dumb action (be it from stupidity or newbishness) doesn't result in a flood of abuse from other players. It leads to being ignored. Which is a lot less stressful than having someone telling you to fuck yourself over the headset.

Okay, kind of off-topic I guess but let's get back on track to the issue at hand which is reality and video games. As the video game industry has developed, increased technical capabilities have allowed the creation of increasingly realistic games. And I'm beginning to wonder whether this is a good thing.

Yeah, great graphics and hyper-realistic games sounded great but what did we really end up with? Alot of games set in greys and browns which look like they were taken from the ghetto. Snarly animated men and grungy settings. Okay, cool, but where's the fun?? I don't really want to turn on my XBox and be confronted with a world that I see when I turn on CNN.

Then there's the fact that the more realistic a game gets, the more obvious it becomes when something in the game isn't realistic. A.I.s in computer games are just not sophisticated enough to be completely human when we interact with them. Which is fine when it's a talking duck or something but stranger when it's a man in a game where the walls at least a wonderfully realistically grey and covered in graffitti. Maybe A.I. responses and animation will one day get to the point where they're completely realistic but at that point, we're probably creepily close to a robot revolution... Which is not a good thing!!! In the mean time, a world where we don't expect things to be realistic is basically much kinder to the gameplay experience.

We play games for FUN and I think one thing Dungeons and Dragons and story books and the whole fantasy and sci-fi genre has shown us is that for a lot of us, crazy worlds which are nothing like ours are an awful lot more interesting and fun than something which looks like what we've got outside our homes.

And plenty of games are proving this desire for a different world to be true. yeah, games like Fallout and GTA IV get critical acclaim but there's no denying weird little games like katamari and plantsVS zombies are strangely gripping in their own way. People like things which challenge their belief of the mystical, which show new ways of imagining a world.

Arguably this is escapism, running away into a reality that's different from our own. But I gotta admit, I don't really see a problem with that so long as people come back.

....

I guess I could also just admit that I like cute little bobble-headed characters.

(I know there's a lot wrong with this post like the fact that I'm comparing games across genres and developer traditions and societal expectations but it's admittedly something of a rant, so deal.)

2 years ago | Comments (0) | + 1 Cool

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