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Secret Weapons for Sacred Wars
Sep. 5th, 2007 03:59 amPersonally, I loathe FPS video games for a lot of reasons.
Honestly though, Grand Theft Auto Vice City appealed me in it's over-the-top-ness because I thought it was making fun of the trend.
It's like how Gabber is awesome when you still think they're not serious about it.
But there is a sort of weird left over slippery horror in the current trend that is a love child of Gramsci and Galbraith in all this.
It does seem as though the institutions are engineering a sort of cold disregard for our fellow humans as mere things.
To blame the video game companies directly though is almost too simple. One must wonder what makes people want MOAR HATE, all the time.
(and it sure seems like they do)
Any simple 5 minute answer is missing a lot. But the long, complicated answers don't lend themselves to simple, but ineffective policy solutions. (that was what they call in the existential detective business, a "clue")
In the mean time, getting people off that hate trip and onto something at least [not based in a thinly-veiled desire to do grievous harm to others] seems like a good idea to me.
RPGs may have their boring spots but at least they teach you how to deal with implacable, arbitrary bureacracies. "Bring me a pay stub, a utility bill and 5 chocobo feathers and I will direct you to another line where they'll take your picture" And most of the foes are either wild animals of some sort, ever the bane of travellers in an interesting environment, or horrible criminal elements themselves.
The abstract strategy games are generally inter-subjectively good, but slightly misleading in a world where opportunities for direct action and decision making are increasingly cut off from most people. You may be able to take out Jack Walsh, even at his own game, but certainly not on his own turf, and he's not coming to you.
I think I'm killing my own point maybe. But none-the-less... FPS games still suck. They have all the false hope of strategy games with none of the actual meta-skill development, unless you consider reaction speed to be something that can get you ahead in life. Maybe driving a war-vehicle, but that's a long hard slog with a lot of potential downside, if you know what I mean.
Also, it's pretty much no surprises. "Oh hey, here's a visually different vicious enemy who wants to kill me! I killed him!" <- rinse and repeat.
While bad graphics can kill a game, good graphics can rarely save one. The mind is pretty damn good at translating something it has bracketed as [not real] into pure process. If only it was as good with things it thinks are real. But anyway, the only worthwhile videogames are either about personal development, abstract competition (go Wii!) or sex, which incorporates both of the former in some warped sense.
A FPS with crazy weapons and such may be no less "fake" to some players as a Tennis sim, but it's definitely more dehumanizing. The proof is that people rarely get highly agitated/intoxicated by their "1337" Virtual Tennis skills. So even though tennis might be an inherently dehumanizing, grinding activity (just kidding! sheesh) it's not going to affect the players the same way KILLING LOTS OF ENEMIES will.
And my main point, just because I lost it a while back, is that we need to ask why killing lots of enemies is so compelling for us right now.
(my guess for a half-kidding proximal cause is because sex games mostly aren't "there" yet... which also explains a lot about media censorship in our society. Go download some awesome porn, people... consider it a relative blessing to the world.)
Thank the lord for the internet. Good night.
Honestly though, Grand Theft Auto Vice City appealed me in it's over-the-top-ness because I thought it was making fun of the trend.
It's like how Gabber is awesome when you still think they're not serious about it.
But there is a sort of weird left over slippery horror in the current trend that is a love child of Gramsci and Galbraith in all this.
It does seem as though the institutions are engineering a sort of cold disregard for our fellow humans as mere things.
To blame the video game companies directly though is almost too simple. One must wonder what makes people want MOAR HATE, all the time.
(and it sure seems like they do)
Any simple 5 minute answer is missing a lot. But the long, complicated answers don't lend themselves to simple, but ineffective policy solutions. (that was what they call in the existential detective business, a "clue")
In the mean time, getting people off that hate trip and onto something at least [not based in a thinly-veiled desire to do grievous harm to others] seems like a good idea to me.
RPGs may have their boring spots but at least they teach you how to deal with implacable, arbitrary bureacracies. "Bring me a pay stub, a utility bill and 5 chocobo feathers and I will direct you to another line where they'll take your picture" And most of the foes are either wild animals of some sort, ever the bane of travellers in an interesting environment, or horrible criminal elements themselves.
The abstract strategy games are generally inter-subjectively good, but slightly misleading in a world where opportunities for direct action and decision making are increasingly cut off from most people. You may be able to take out Jack Walsh, even at his own game, but certainly not on his own turf, and he's not coming to you.
I think I'm killing my own point maybe. But none-the-less... FPS games still suck. They have all the false hope of strategy games with none of the actual meta-skill development, unless you consider reaction speed to be something that can get you ahead in life. Maybe driving a war-vehicle, but that's a long hard slog with a lot of potential downside, if you know what I mean.
Also, it's pretty much no surprises. "Oh hey, here's a visually different vicious enemy who wants to kill me! I killed him!" <- rinse and repeat.
While bad graphics can kill a game, good graphics can rarely save one. The mind is pretty damn good at translating something it has bracketed as [not real] into pure process. If only it was as good with things it thinks are real. But anyway, the only worthwhile videogames are either about personal development, abstract competition (go Wii!) or sex, which incorporates both of the former in some warped sense.
A FPS with crazy weapons and such may be no less "fake" to some players as a Tennis sim, but it's definitely more dehumanizing. The proof is that people rarely get highly agitated/intoxicated by their "1337" Virtual Tennis skills. So even though tennis might be an inherently dehumanizing, grinding activity (just kidding! sheesh) it's not going to affect the players the same way KILLING LOTS OF ENEMIES will.
And my main point, just because I lost it a while back, is that we need to ask why killing lots of enemies is so compelling for us right now.
(my guess for a half-kidding proximal cause is because sex games mostly aren't "there" yet... which also explains a lot about media censorship in our society. Go download some awesome porn, people... consider it a relative blessing to the world.)
Thank the lord for the internet. Good night.
