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Playing Games Seen as Brainless Hobby?
Richard Goodness writes "Recently I watched Simon Bysshe's film Modern Day Gamer. The film is a natural springboard for some talk of the shared experience of videogames and the legitimization of gaming as a form of entertainment. Therefore, in '2 Legit 2 Save and Quit,' I come to some conclusions." A good article, with some excellent points. I took this to heart, but I see a weekly D&D session with friends as being akin to a weekly poker game but with less financial repercussions, unless one counts all the books needed.
Brainless??? I play Ragnarok Online. You know how much thought has to go into being a merchant. It's like the stock market or something. You gotta price low enough to undercut competition yet sell high enough to make money.
Right. But most of the non-gamers I know see it more as "Oh he spends all his time shooting zombies on his computer". They don't understand that it IS strategy, and in some cases, even more strategic then Risk or Battleship board (Bored?) games.
My mom and dad especially, see it as brainless, as do most of my friends parents. I find it a very enjoyable pursuit, however!
The only problem with that is that I do talk to my peers. My nongamer friends think that not only do videogames not have any serious messages to say--but they think that it's not possible for them to. Yeah, the current establishment thinks that games are a toy...but I'm afraid that sometimes it seems that the establishment-to-be feels the same way.
I think that anyone who would say "video games are mindless entertainment" obviously does not understand enough about games to make such a judgment. That said, games run the whole spectrum from purely mindless entertainment to extremely though provoking.
Lets start out with an example, two games that I play alot are Kolf and KBounce, both are relativily simple and quite mindless games. These are games that I play during commercials on TV if i'm watching a show, during a lul in the conversation when i'm on the phone, while i'm waiting for a huge file to compile, or any other time when I just want some small distraction while I wait on something. These games are really mindless.
Lets look at another game that I play quite a bit. Soul Caliber II. This is a game that combines quick reflexes with strategy to defeat an opponent. It's not chess but it will keep you thinking, especially when you are playing against a human opponent, who's tactics are not quite as predictable as the computers.
Now for a third game, Neverwinter Nights. Since it's hard for my friends and I to get together and play D&D like we used too, usually a couple nights a week we will fire up Neverwinter Nights and play a DMed quest. This game definitly involves heavy thinking. Not only are there puzzles to be solved and tactics to be developed, but you must also manage inventory, remember to play in character, keep track of your health, spells/special abilities, the status of your party. If you are the DM for that particular game things get even more complicated as you have to have interesting and realistic in character text for NPCs, keep the flow of the story going etc.
Now, lets look at what non-gamers see when the look at each of these games:
Kolf and KBounce - a bunch of clicking
Soul Caliber II - pressing buttons and beating eachother up.
Neverwinter Nights - clicking on monsters and IMing your friends (remeber to someone who has never played D&D there is no challenge to playing in character, in fact few of them probably even realise there is such a thing as in character)
The thing is, most people have played solitaire (pretty brainless), or have played those brainless games on Pogo or the click the box game or whatever. Those are brainless games for (mostly) brainless people. When these people look at other games being played, they do not realize the though requied and associate the difficult level as being the same as the games they play. One has to realize that it is difficult to "see" thinking.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
We've come a long way since the inanity of Pong (face it, it didn't expand your mind at all)
I daresay that, among those whose first introduction to games was Pong, there were many who could not previously grasp the concept of being able to control the actions of something on a TV screen by pressing buttons. So I'd have to disagree with your assertation - maybe Pong didn't have riveting social commentary, but it did expand people's minds.
Since when did GenX become the establishment???
:-)
I'm a GenX-er, comfortably in my mid-30's, and i've bene playing computer games since the early 80's when my Apple II+ was da bomb. I don't care to watch TV, so playing games on my PC is my preferred way of unwinding after work, or entertaining myself while the wife is watching the tube or doing something else I'm not interested in.
Calling video games artistic expression might be a bit much, though. The main type of expression I see when walking through a LAN full of CS-ers is hardly what I'd call 'artistic'... more like 'profane'.