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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6932785.stm
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'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? 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 expensive. Extraordinarily expensive, once you factor in the hardware you need to play them.
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!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.
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.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.
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.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.
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?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.
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 wrote: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!
<ankh> wrote: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).