Are we all Losers?

[Ovi]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6932785.stm

[Xest]

Worst article ever. So bad I feel the need to rip it to shreds piece by piece!

They've made me friends, taught me Chinese history, and helped me conquer my phobia of slugs. But the more I play, the more I'm struck by an unavoidable realisation. Games are rubbish. Really, dismally, rubbish.

Really? I guess books and films are all rubbish too then, in fact all forms of entertainment are rubbish. Surely the fact that Spielberg, George Lucas and Peter Jackson have turned away from directing some of the greatest movies of all time to directing stories and development for computer games gives as much credibility to the idea that games can not only tell stories as well as films and books, but do it better due to the interactive nature. Judging by this, what makes games rubbish exactly? Their aim like any form of media is to tell tales and/or entertain, they achieve both this goals as much if not better than any other form of media.

They're expensive. Extraordinarily expensive, once you factor in the hardware you need to play them.

Really? A TV and DVD player + DVDs cost too, books aren't exactly cheap. Some sports can cost a fortune, I like ice hockey, skiing, snowboarding but buying a hockey stick and full kit or skiis and so forth coupled with the expenses of playing/ski lift tickets costs far more than any games console + games. When you look at amount of time spent entertained per £, computer games turn out one of the cheapest - this is by far the case with MMOs. A week holiday can cost you the same amount as a solid years worth of gaming.

They're massively - and awkwardly - time consuming. There are games with 24 hour day/night cycles which you may need to play at particular times.

Entertainment is time consuming? I'm sorry that having fun is such a chore for you dear. God damn the latest harry potter for taking hours to read through, it's so awkwardly time consuming!

There are games with badly spaced save-points so you're left with the choice of switching off when it suits you and losing an hour of progress, or playing on even if it doesn't.

There are also movies that I've felt the movie company responsible should compensate me for wasting my time and bandwidth downloading they were so bad. On behalf of the entire computer games industry, I apologise about the fact that all games designers didn't contact you personally to base their entire games catalog around your tastes.

Even setting aside the fact that all you do is sit still and twitch your fingers, for hours on end, there's the fact that what you do in games is so relentlessly repetitive. Kill the same enemies hundreds and hundreds of times. Race round and round and round the same circuits.

As opposed to sitting around watching TV not even twitching your fingers for hours on end? Or reading a book where all you do is flip pages for hours on end? Then there's the fact that all you do on TV is watch the same characters and all you do with a book is read the same words like "and" and "if". Yes, perhaps if you oversimplify things then yeah they sure as hell do sound boring.

And - here's the kicker - games aren't just boring, inconvenient, and over-priced. They're designed to make you feel like a failure.

There's a very good chance - a certainty in most games - that there will come a point where the game will beat you.

Erm, that's assuming you just outright give up the first time you die. Completing games has quite the opposite effect of making me feel like a loser, it's quite a fun achievement, an unimportant one in the grand scheme of things but it's an achievement - one that I enjoy reaching. Should we go as far as saying sport is pointless because people pay all this money to play/watch it and all it's designed for is to make the loser feel like a, erm, loser?

I realise she's setting up for the rest of her argument, but she's basing her argument on the premise that it's the only reason anyone plays games, her points and the other points can happily co-exist together, some games offer mindless fun and people play because of that, not because it's a mental workout, subconscious or not. There are games I've played through that haven't been that taxing, graphically impressive and so forth but the storyline rocked to the point I'd recommend people play through just for the storyline, to this degree I'd argue if you took out the interactive component making it into a film people would still watch it, proving that the mental workout portion of playing isn't the only reason to play. I'm pretty certain there's a lot of people that play games because of the feelings of high they achieve when they do succeed, this seems to be particularly the case for competitive multiplayer games - that it's not about learning, it's about human competitive instinct to beat the other player.

I'm not sure why people feel the need to write articles like this, because it must surely be obvious to them that whilst they have a point it's not that they've figured out some new magical answer to the sole reason people do things but rather they've figured out one of the many facets of human behaviour in a particle scenario.

One final note however is I can't fault her entirely, computer games need a reputation increase, with various news outlets telling us each time there's a murder that it's all because of computer games or just general gaming rots your mind propaganda it's stuff like this that helps fight such anti-gaming propaganda.

[Gandelf]

She should have made the point also, that games can also teach you that cheating is acceptable. E.g. in a game where you're finding it nigh impossible to complete a particular level, or to kill a particular mob, quite often you'll find that there are cheat codes available on the Internet!

[<ankh>]

She should have made the point also, that games can also teach you that cheating acceptable. E.g. in a game where you're finding it nigh impossible to complete a particular level, or to kill a particular mob, quite often you'll find that there are cheat codes available on the Internet!

It's not exactly people forcing you to cheat - so I don't agree. The cheatcodes are not often on the game creators homepage (with some exceptions ofc).

[Gandelf]

It's not exactly people forcing you to cheat - so I don't agree. The cheatcodes are not often on the game creators homepage (with some exceptions ofc).

Yes, that's true. Not everyone uses cheats, but the fact that one can find cheats on the Internet obviously means that some people use them or search for them. If no-one used cheats then such sites would simply not exist.

[Xest]

I don't think it means that it means it teaches people cheating is acceptable though, it's just a market built to cater for those already happy to use cheats.

[Gandelf]

I don't think it means that it means it teaches people cheating is acceptable though, it's just a market built to cater for those already happy to use cheats.

I see your point. The deviant factor is probably already inherent.

[Lieva]

people just suck
websites help them suck easier

[OohhoO]

Life sucks
Games suck too but not nearly as much as RL
Therefore, people prefer playing games to RL
QED

[Lieva]

QED

qed??:?