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Games As The New Pub
The Guardian Gamesblog has a column up talking about a panel held at the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival last week. A discussion was held with several folks from the online world development business, where they discussed games as new social playgrounds or pubs. From the article: "In Korea, the gamers play online games together. It's a social replacement. It's a way for non-social people to socialise. They've even started developing games for bored girlfriends of the guys who're playing Starcraft with their mates."
Now if I could only get my girlfriend to play games...
From the post:
It may be a way for non-social people to socialize, if you really want to call it that. But it's hardly, and never will be a social replacement for people who really like to socialize.
I've never really "got" games so I admit a personal bias, but I've never seen any evidence in wave after wave of new technology and new generations of games there is any indication games are a social replacement. I see the same people playing the same games in some variation, but I see no exodus of people-to-people socialization to interaction via gaming.
Yes, there will always be gamers and yes, I see a place for games and gamers, but it's a niche demographic. And, it's probably not worth a lot of investment of time to write games for the girlfriends of the gamers. Either they too like to play games or they don't. They're more likely to be happy finding a good TV show, a good magazine (or a crummy one for that matter), or a new boyfriend.
Gamers have girlfriends now?! Why doesn't anyone tell me these things?!!!
Accept any challenge, No matter the odds.
It's a good idea, and I'm sure lots of people try and use games for socialization, but we are really going to have to wait for teledildonics to be perfected first...
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
They've even started developing games for bored girlfriends of the guys who're playing Starcraft with their mates."
a.k.a. "Cheating"
Well me and my mates used to have Friday Night games, all go round my mates place, (his rents brought him a house, they lived up country). Played games, drinked beer, passed out.
Partly because it was good fun, partly coz half of us didnt have fake IDs.
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I agree. I always get nervous at the thought of approaching that tall, blonde broad over there. You know, the one busy collecting treasures. Maybe I can induce her interest by offering her a token of my kindness -- perhaps a couple gold coins.
Well, I guess you could draw parallels between games and pubs -- gold will always court a woman :)
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Koreans were the easiest opponent in Starcraft when I played. Today they're probably pretty good. The reason Koreans were the easiest opponent was that they all hung out in gaming pubs. In gaming pubs, you exchange information on what is the best strategy, but seldom does original thought originate from them. You would always fight zergling/muta rushes that were so predictable that it was simple to counter them. Now many people died to this zergling/muta rush because the Korean players had it down to a science. They played a lot, and they really got their strategy down efficient, and that was their downfall when I or any other pro played them.
:) Starcraft(not Broodwar), had a balance that was unique. If a pro squared off against a non-pro, the game would be over far before the third tiered units came onto the field. If a pro squared off against another pro, and there was no mutual respect involved, the one who made the first mistake lost well before tier 3. If a pro squared off against another pro, and one side respected the other, it'd win, unless it made a mistake(The superior economy + defense beats any attack). Finally if both pros squared off against each other, and both gave mutual respect, then the game could really become a tier 3 nightmare. It was very rare for 2 pros meet each other. It was even more rare for 2 pros to meet each other and show respect for each other.
Now you could play someone of another nationality who doesn't have a gaming pub, and you'd have no idea of what to expect because people that don't hang out in gaming pubs tend to wing it and develop their own strategy. Typically people who don't hang out in gaming pubs used strategies that were original but not refined. I can only remember a handful of people in the world that had original strategies that were completely refined.
Thats about it for my post, I'll just conclude with some memories of Starcraft
God spoke to me.
In Korea, only the old gamers play online games together.
That may be true in Korea, but I don't think that it's true in the US.
* Gamers devote more than triple the amount of time spent playing games each week to exercising or playing sports, volunteering in the community, religious activities, creative endeavors, cultural activities, and reading.
* In total, gamers spend 23.4 hours per week on these activities, compared to 6.8 hours per week playing games.
* Seventy-nine percent of game players of all ages report exercising or playing sports an average of 20 hours a month.
* Forty-five percent of gamers volunteer an average 5.4 hours per month.
* Ninety-three percent of game players also report reading books or daily newspapers on a regular basis, while sixty-two percent consistently attend cultural events, such as concerts, museums, or the theater.
* Fifty percent of gamers are regularly involved in creative activities, such as painting, writing, or playing an instrument. In addition, adult gamers exhibit a high level of interest in current events, with 94 percent following news and current events, and 78 percent reporting that they vote in most of the elections for which they are eligible.
http://www.theesa.com/facts/gamer_data.php
You never "got" games, in your own words, but you're here posting on Slashdot, which is a kind of socializing in itself. I also personally know pretty social people (in fact, "chatterboxes" would also be a way to describe some of them) which do supplement their face-to-face chatting with a variety of online means. Game are just a slice of that.
If you're looking at online communication in general, there is a very signifficant number of people who use email or VOIP on a daily basis to communicate with old friends far away, instead of going out and making new friends to get their fill of chatting. Mom for example spends literally hours emailing everyone she knows, and now is in another town or some of them in another country.
That's the kind of "exodus" that is happening. Some time ago, if you needed to talk to someone, you pretty much _had_ to go do just that. Go find someone, anyone, in your near proximity to talk to face-to-face. You wouldn't log into Slashdot or some game board to see who answered your messages, you'd go to the pub or whatever.
There are however problems with that model, that you probably realize. Phisical proximity being the deciding factor, other stuff like common interests was mostly a hit-and-miss affair. Mostly miss, in fact.
Let's be frank, many a conversation I've had were boring as hell. And many a conversation I've been basically in what I call "Eliza mode", after the program ELIZA. You can talk to people for _years_ by just paraphrasing the things they've said right back at them later. (Keyword being: later. If you do it right in the next sentence they tend to notice it.)
Conversely, there also is a conformity pressure involved in getting that kind of thing going at all. E.g., let's be honest, a lot of people are into football or listen the same music as everyone else in their school, just to have some common topic with the people in that small pool of people available based on proximity.
The mirage of the internet is basically that it eliminates this very problem. You can talk to the people _you_ want to talk to (old friends, or random people who hopefully have the same interests because they're in a chat room or on a board dedicated to that topic, or in a game you play) rather than whatever happens to be available.
And arguably even telephone was already the beginning of that effect. When your kid would rather spend half the evening on the phone with his/her school mates, instead of having those 19'th century family evenings where you have to talk to each other merely by virtue of that being the only choice available, that's just it. The available pool of people to talk to is now larger than what physical proximity used to dictate.
Internet just enlarged the pool even more.
The effects are more subtle than noticing an outright "exodus" where everyone just stops talking face-to-face at all, but they are there.
And it has to be said that some people did, in fact, do just that: mostly stopped talking face to face. They're not a majority or anything, but they exist. Some of those apparently "non-social" people are in fact social people all right. They just switched to talking over a medium instead of tolerating any self-centred bore to get any communication at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Oh, I know that one. It's played with one ethernet cable and it's called "Plug out, plug in!"
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. - Will Duran
I can see that lasting long!
Did you get that thing I sent ya?
That still happens. See here for a hilarious example of that. Scroll down to the fifth post for a laugh.
I think its a great idea. But Personally, i got lucky and my girlfriend playes more games than i do!
Whenever someone mentions multiplayer they always say "In Korea..." and then cite some sort of crazy statistic, like:
"In Korea, 4.5 million people worship Starcraft as religion, would rather have IM on their cell phones than talk, are willing to pay the equivalent of 50 american dollars a day to play multiplayer games, and a recent poll says every citizen in Korea under the age 18 is planning on naming their first born Arcturus Mengsk"
And they say this, as if it really means anything at all to the rest of the world.
Fastball has been removed from the server.
Yeah, just the kind of people you want to share a draught with.
This is nothing new. Take your average MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MOO/WHATEVER. Look around it, and you'll find some people playing/involved in plots. Unless it's a really big event, though, you'll find more of them in "bar scenes" or out-of-character areas having conversation.
Although I have to thank the high-end MMORPG operators and gamemasters for creating sparkly, attractive, and perhaps even slightly ADD-inflicting environments. They've attracted enough people that playing online can be considered "a technologically sophisticated social norm" instead of a "creepy internet addiction."
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So it's sorta social, demented and sad, but social. Right?
In Starcraft there were several legitamate starting moves.
:)
Rush and lose economy.
Build Big economy and moderate tier 1 army before teching/expanding.
Build Big economy and tech with smallest possible defense.
Build Big economy and expand with smallest possible defense.
Build big economy and totally mass tier 1 army.
In Starcraft, any of these moves were legitamate and had their plusses and negatives.
In BroodWar, tier 2 units dominated tier 1 units... So even if someone massed tier 1 units, and created a defensive perimeter around your base, you could break it with tier 2 units. Basically BroodWar eliminated the whole early game. Where there were many more options and depth, there was nothing. Just like in some games, everyone plays the super powerful character because it does everything the gimpy character does, only better... It was just generally useless to create tier 1 units except for rush defense.
It really bummed me out because I was about the only person on Battlenet that did the SCV+ marine rush
I still played BroodWar, but it seemed like a waste. When the opening game was something of variety in Starcraft, in BroodWar it was just more time to wait... Like the game starts at mid game instead of the beginning of the game... Most of the newbs and intermediates like BroodWar because they didn't understand the start game to begin with, and they like to use the later game units.
But if Blizzard really wanted to solve early rushes, they could have put in NOOB DEFENDERS that could be built at your COmmand Center instead of SCV. So you sacrifice economy, but build a powerful defender. It'd totally give noobs a fighting chance. No expert would ever want to sacrifice some economy for some early game defence. It'd have to have a long build time and cost 2x the SCV.
God spoke to me.
They are right when they say the games are a social replacement, but when the people playing them do not socialise in any other way than the game, it is worrying
You will have a nation of people who would rather play Starcraft than go out, spend money, reproduce... all things the country needs
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