A gaming thread for 2019

These are good videos as it’s really not that fun to play and I’ve basically told you the theme so it wont surprise you.

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Really enjoyed these.

having a great time watching this (I remember hearing about the original book as a child, but didn’t realise the aftermath is even crazier)

Also, re: Nier: Automata (about which I am veeery curious as to what’s going on with the multiple playthrough stuff), has anyone played the original Nier? Any connection, or is it like Final Fantasy?

i don’t think it’s all that weird. Violence has been used as entertainment for humans in some form or another going back to when we first climbed down from the trees. Video games are just another iteration of it. I guess it satisfies some deeply primitive, animalistic desire in many of us. No idea if this is good or not, that’s a different story (probably it’s bad).

I think things like Saw and even murder porn stuff like CSI are really weird too, fwiw.

But video games can be even weirder in that they encourage and reward (in-game) violent acts. That makes it a bit different to e.g. the killing of Polonius in Hamlet or whatever. There’s agency involved.

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oh sure, and i definitely think it’s bad that kids can quite easily get hold of GTA or something and while away an afternoon shooting, stabbing, burning or beating people to death, and the game conditions them to associate all this with fun/entertainment/in-game rewards etc. it must be having some kind of effect on the psyche, especially on younger people whose brains/personalities/worldviews are still developing…

This thread has got very “alright Tipper Gore” all of a sudden.

Not sure I agree with that. I just think it’s weird that adults with free choice over what they do for entertainment choose, in droves, to play increasingly realistic games about shooting human beings in the head with accurately modelled weapons. Or watch Saw.

It is bizarre and disconcerting that the biggest games all involve endless murder sprees but it’s a bit harsh to single out God of War for it. It’s hardly the most egregious example. Though it’s part an interesting trend that the big AAA games have to attempt to bolt on some kind of interesting narrative and Say Something now, which wasn’t always the case and is probably worthy of criticism. However you dress it up it still boils down to ‘go here, kill the bad people.’

It’s an ingrained cultural thing though. The most lucrative movies by far all involve people in capes smashing up bad guys, and we pat ourselves on the back because now people of colour and women are allowed to smash up bad guys too. There’s more interesting stuff going on under the radar in both mediums but violence is still what sells. Ain’t no getting around that.

There’s the old realism factor too - when many of us started gaming, games weren’t that realistic (I expect). Advances in processing power were made gradually, and we may not have noticed as the violence in games got closer and closer to ‘life’. So we’ve gone from Mario jumping on a Koopa (cartoony and fun) to CoD etc, but we might be acclimatised to that.

Games have always had an element of ‘take out the baddies’, from chess onwards, but these days chess pieces are people, man.

Hotline Miami had a reasonable take on ultraviolence (while being incredibly gratuitous itself) - all the ‘why do you enjoy hurting people?’, and ultimately blaming the player for their actions, without getting a reprieve from the story

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I think this is a good point and something that’s going to become a bigger issue as VR becomes more prevalent I think. We’re still doing, "press Y for violent takedown’ at the moment, which no matter how graphic the result offers a certain distance. As soon as we’re reaching out and snapping necks ourselves I can see myself going a bit Mary Whitehouse.

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Also Hotline Miami was great for that in a having-it’s-cake-and-eating-it sort of way. I didn’t like the sequel at all mostly because it sought to explain something that needed no explanation. The first one was ultimately meaningless, a sort of weird fever dream, which emphasised the sordid nature of the hyper-violence. Trying to craft some apocalyptic grand narrative to it was a terrible idea which robbed it of that.

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Agreed, the gameplay updates were good, but it didn’t need expanding from a story perspective, it was self-contained. Bit like The Raid/Raid 2 - tight, tense original then big sprawly sequel.

Maybe HM2 was a satire on convoluted franchises?

Yeah definitely, the earliest games I played were Spectrum platformers where the ‘violence’ was a pixel hitting a bunch of pixels, no more graphic than space invaders. Then stuff like point n clicks with basically zero violence. Even the violent games of that era was stuff like Mortal Kombat which isn’t realistic at all compared to what you get nowadays.

Some of the games I play nowadays certainly do I have some violence in and I do occasionally wince at the overly gratuitous bits. I remember God of War 2 having some nasty bits.

Context is important; stuff against monsters/demons is less problematic than against humans. Also if it’s in a narrative game and violence is contained to certain bits then that’s not as bad than your CoD deathmatch style play where violence is repeated and removed from narrative context.

I think certain people and audiences do revel in violence a bit too much. I remember in a Last of Us preview at E3 or something ended with a execution animation for an enemy (so not a cut scene) where Joel shot a guy in the face with a shotgun at point blank range and the audience cheered wildly and it made me very uncomfortable.

Of course I also expect the vast majority of adults to be able to differentiate video game violence and real life violence so I don’t think it’s a massive problem for society but kids certainly should not be playing ‘adult’ games.

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Yeah, glad there are ratings. The agency involved in game violence can make it potentially more damaging than just watching it.

Luckily us adults can separate games from real life - it’s not like playing RPGs makes me perform repetitive tasks in front of a screen for small rewards :thinking: :open_mouth:

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That does sound a bit odd. That said, I thought TLOU did an amazing job of throwing that notion of you being a hero for shooting what’s in front of you back in your face. Particularly that final sequence when you’re raining all hell in the facility and really not feeling at all good about it.

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Yeah I think Last of Us is a fantastic game and that was a context animation and not part of the narrative and I think I might have even been toned down for the European release.

I do think there’s something very American about the celebration of violence. The other thing that stayed with me was in Boardwalk Empire where a guy gets a hot iron in the face in quite a graphic and horrific manner, but then in the dvd extras, the editor or whoever was talking about how funny that scene was, that he was getting people in to watch it and literally being in hysterics over and over again. I just thought, what is wrong with you?

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That’s really well put! The second one disappointed me so much with it’s lack of self-awareness. When it switches off so do you. I can’t remember it at all to be honest. Still think about the first one from time to time.

I know we’re not allowed to talk about it here, but one of the many ways Dark Souls is great is in how it casts the incessant violence as a mix of mercy-killing and futility, and the way it draws parallels between the hollowing of everyone you meet and your own eventual decision to stop the cycle of violence.

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