http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things-ga ... -but-dont/
Ahem,
Hi, I'm Ashton, and I like video games. You may remember me from such threads as Pumpkin's Video Game Diary and Fallout: New Vegas!
I hadn't been on Cracked in a bit because... I dunno, didn't feel like it, but today I got a ton of homework done and decided to mosey on over. Quelle surprise! An article about video games, how interesting this will be! Except that it wasn't, and I didn't like it. Join me now as I explain why!
Firstly, it's great that he enjoys the new Doom, I've heard good things. That doesn't mean that every game needs to be that and that because he decided he doesn't enjoy the things on the list, that all gamers should be lumped in. I'm also not most gamers but I am active in a few video game communities, I'm an editor on one of them, and, well, I play a heck of a lot of video games. I'm assuming a lot of this was addressed in the comments, but I wanted to talk about it here as well and see what other TCSers think.
4. Absolute Freedom (Means There's Nothing to Do)
The title is mostly true, a lot of people like objectives when wandering around aimlessly gets boring. People enjoy open worlds for the less constricting experience. Like in Fallout you can wander around and then find little sidequests to do, meet people, experience stories, and the game didn't push you to them. You just explore and discover.
The No Man's Sky thing is, apparently, just not true though from what I understand. He said that people were upset because boring and everything promised was there. From what I've seen, that's a lie. A lot of things promised were not given and some people had expectations that were not met and were left disappointed. I personally still totally want to play it eventually, but saying they delivered on everything is false and that the only reason they don't like it is because boring and bad multiplayer is false.
#3. We Want Movie-Quality Stories (As Long As They Don't Get In The Way Of Our Murder Fantasies)
While many people take issue with some games becoming more and more movie like at the expense of gameplay, that doesn't mean they want more shallow stories. Likewise, many other people greatly enjoy story driven games and place it above gameplay in order of importance. Although this doesn't mean that they'd be better as movies necessarily. His example of The Last of Us is, I think, a bad one. People adored that game and I think it works great as a game. One thing video games have over movies is that they're more interactive experiences over a longer period of time, which increases a persons emotional investment. Spending 12 hours with Joel and Ellie, hands on, and actually pushing them through the narrative, going through the struggle with them (like when you control Ellie in that one part with Terrible McGee not respecting boundaries) makes it have a BIGGER impact for a lot people than sitting in a theater for two hours. That's why we're seeing so many "movie sim" style adventure games lately. People like movies, and this way they can PLAY the movies and spend more time with the story and world and characters they love.
Bioshock is a narrative told largely through gameplay and environment as opposed to cutscenes and dialogues, which is pretty unique to the media and I think it's great that people can have those experiences. Story heavy games have personally helped me develop as a person by getting me to learn more about psychology, how to view the world in different ways, how to get closer to a first hand look at dealing with forms of discrimination I've thankfully never had to deal with, about how to deal with morally ambiguous dilemmas and how to solve problems. Making these more hands on and personal through the use of story driven video games is an excellent way to help people learn and try these things. Just like books and movies can do the same thing for us. Putting me in a position to deal with a moral dilemma and having to deal with the consequences just hits closer to home than reading about someone else making the decision. This isn't to trash books or movies either, they're better than games at other things, but my point is that each media has its own strengths in helping us grow and learn.
Now I'm not saying we should do away with games like Doom, just like we shouldn't do away with trashy romance novels or terrible rom coms. Sometimes you just want some fun, and there's nothing wrong with that. But limiting games to ONLY that is really selling short what the medium can and does do. People like me and many others sometimes want to have a deeper, more involved experience that lets us learn more about our humanity and think about things in new ways.
2. Cutting-Edge Graphics (Don't Matter)
For the most part, I agree with this. Some of the best games I've played have some less than great graphics and they still hold up just fine. Especially RPG's because the focus is usually on story rather than graphics. Some genres do benefit from increased graphics though and some genres age very poorly, but overall a game doesn't need great graphics to be great. But it's always good to keep pushing what we can do, I suppose.
1. We Want The Devs To Not Be Involved In The Games
I... really don't get this one? Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't want the creator's opinion shoehorned in or shoved in my face. I'd much rather have a "Bloop, here's an issue" and be allowed to make up my own mind about it. Like if Chad (apparently) came up to me and just said, "So that BLM movement, huh? What do you think about that?" without giving me his own opinion, I... wouldn't really care? I'd figure he was just presenting an issue to see what I thought or hadn't formed an opinion of his own yet. I don't need people to come at me with their own opinions in order to have a topic discussed.
Anywho, there's my much too long nitpick of the article :? What did you guys think?
Edit:
Forgot the link, thank you gisambards and whoever edited the post!