
It’s time gamers took gaming more seriously - heyitswin
http://insertquarterly.com/2013/04/12/jedi-mind-control-serious-gaming-for-the-human-brain/
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ebbv
This article is kind of all over the place. On the one hand it is making a
sort of "All entertainment we experience affects who we are." argument which
is so broad as to be meaningless -- change on what level? Watching one episode
of Jeopardy doesn't change me in a meaningful way, watching Jeopardy every
night for 10 years might.

Then it transitions into "Here's a list of questions to help you appreciate
games on a deeper level", which is to me, both wrongheaded and insulting.

It's wrongheaded because who are you to say how people should enjoy games?
People are different, unless someone is harming you, let them do what they
want to do. Maybe someone spends all day as an academic educating graduate
students about the deeper meaning of 19th century literature. At the end of
the day maybe they're ready to just load up Team Fortress 2 and blow up some
people with cartoony missiles.

To me, telling people "this is how you should enjoy games" is much more
condescending than a post saying "these are the games you should enjoy, and
these other games are bad." It's moving beyond just matters of taste into
telling people how to think and how to behave.

~~~
pharrington
_Questions to help yourself take games more seriously_

It's a suggestion. She is sharing an opinion. Nowhere does she cast judgement
on how or why you're enjoying your games. She's proposing a way to get a
little more intellectual stimulation from games, and you can take it or leave
it. While I personally think the specific questions are a bit too broad and
shallow, there's no reason for the possibility of an alternative mode of
thought to be offend me.

Because somebody says "try doing X," does _not_ mean she says "you are bad for
not doing X."

~~~
kabdib
_Where is the artistic value in this game?_

Blowing stuff up is fun? Try Robotron, or Serious Sam. You're saying I need to
examine someone's motivation and weigh a game's social conscience before I
install the thing, or I'm a bad person?

Get real. Blowing stuff up is fun.

Once upon a time at Atari, one of the head Marketroids in the home computer
division decided "No violent games!" The problem was, all of the non-violent
games they were able to come up with _stunk_. They sunk millions into
developing titles that didn't sell.

I "played" _Dear Esther_ and it was interesting, but I uninstalled it and
there's no point in going back; I won't play another game like that.

I want to play games with a social conscience as their primary mission about
as much as I want to attend another mandatory sensitivity training. [For the
record, I only had to do that once, a long time ago. :-) ]

For the most part, games are made to make money. This is what companies _do_.
If you're saying that _Dear Esther_ is the answer, then the question is very
silly indeed; it's not what the market wants.

[For the record, I do think that "bikini armor" in RPGs is stupid, and I wish
they'd stop. But my Old Fart notions are swamped by the cash represented by a
legion of 15 year old boys.]

~~~
pharrington
"You're saying I need to examine someone's motivation and weigh a game's
social conscience before I install the thing, or I'm a bad person?"

Well thats the thing... I'm not saying that, and I'm 100% sure the blog author
isn't saying that either. Asking yourself what the artistic value in the game
is is not the same thing as (yet does often lead to) evaluating the game in a
socio-political context. It is examining your responses to the game, be they
intellectual or visceral, and asking what elements of the game trigger those
responses. Ask yourself how those elements form a coherent experience.

I love shmups and action games. Right now I'm trying to get good at Devil May
Cry 4, and the newest game I've played though is Metal Gear Rising:
Revengeance. These games have a strong focus on enabling creativity by giving
the player avatar as much power and control as possible while balancing the
enemy scenarios to still provide a challenge. Since stylish gameplay is the
core of these games, asking exactly _how_ the game gives the player so much
control and creativity is fundamental to examining their artistic value. But
they are also games with narratives: MGR:R is about a psychopathic former
child soldier who's turned into a cyborg mercenary. He "refuels" by ripping
out his enemies' spines and eating them. DMC4 begins with the series' half-
demon protagonist crashing into a church and assassinating the pope. They are
games with narratives, and whether or not the narratives are _good_ , they
impact the player experience and are certainly worth considering.

All anyone is saying is to try paying more attention to, and reflecting on,
what you're thinking and feeling when playing games. You might enjoy them
more. You might not.

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rickdale
Its time developers took gaming less seriously. When I was growing up every
game had codes and one of the best parts of the nes/snes/sega era was game
genie. I didn't even want a system without the game genie. Nowadays,
developers don't want you bashing through their games. Some games like COD's
will let you put in codes only after beating the campaign mode. Because every
gamer is like, oh wow I beat that now let me do it with codes on...' The other
thing I have found is like in Red Dead Redemption where you can use codes, but
you cant save the game if you use them.

I spend a crap load on games. Its come to the point now where I will check if
a game has cheat codes before I purchase it. IMHO Assassin Creed 3, Far Cry 3,
both super shitty games. And on top of being super shitty games the developers
are wont let you control the world and insist you play the game the way it was
intended.

Developers taking games too serious is ruining video games. Its not suppose to
be serious its a video game, at least thats what my friends tell me after I
cuss them out for beating me in Fifa...

~~~
JenniferFinelli
I think a lot of people would agree with you on the developers with coding,
but would argue that it's more of an issue of money versus art. "In the old
days," they'd say, "artists earned basically nothing and did art because they
cared about the art," or something like that. It's also a very Western
phenomenon to make art closed-code. We think of "canon" StarWars or "canon"
literature, but in Japanese literature, it was actually common practice for
writers to "add on" to the works they liked the best. That work then became
passed on to the next generation. There wasn't this idea of "canonicity."

In the same way, some game developers are moving away from the idea of closed-
code gaming--but we're talking indie games here. Minecraft is the best example
ever. The download software actually includes folders for you to put in all
your mods. And, in the end, that formula makes money. People like being able
to add their creativity to your product, so why not let them?

So fear not, my friend, not all developers are as tightfisted as those COD
folks. And, even when they do, for the technologically savvy, where there's a
will, there's always a way. = )

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freehunter
I personally feel this may be taking the "games as art" discussion a bit too
far. Yes, some games are art, and almost all games have artistic value. But
when I'm playing Quake, I don't care about any of that. All I care about is
that it's fun and it's challenging and I'm playing with my friends. Just like
when I'm watching the latest summer blockbuster, I don't care that it won't
win an Oscar, or that the girl in the plot is really just there to stand
around and look pretty, or that the hero is somehow surviving things that no
human could withstand. It's fun.

I could go through Ico with this post and glean a lot from it. Taking the same
thing to Battlefield 3 might yield substantially different results. I
personally don't care. Not all the music I listen to is art, either.

~~~
lubujackson
I think the "art vs. not art" discussion isn't the big thing, though. It's
really more about awareness of the mechanism of a game and understanding WHY
it's fun/intriguing to humans. That brings up interesting discussions
regardless of any "artistic message" - the "funness" itself is a type of
artistic expression.

You can see this sort of discourse about games like Ms. Pacman where people
breakdown the paths of the ghosts and how it adds just enough randomness to
remain endlessly intriguing (unlike regular Pacman)

I think the point is we can really discuss human nature through what games
people like and how they impact us. I guess that's the point of discussing
art, too.

~~~
JenniferFinelli
Couldn't have said it better! ^_^

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gmu3
The author seems to believe we should adopt a literacy about games very
similar to one used when evaluating literature. I think this is incredibly
misguided, because they're entirely different mediums (or at least should be).
In Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You, he compares video games to
word problems, and says video games like word problems should be judged by
their cognitive challenges not their literary merit.

If you want to evaluate games seriously by looking through a narrative lens, I
don't think video games could ever surpass books in their ability to tell a
story. The ability to control an avatar "normally makes a coherent
interpretation of the avatar and his / her behavior in regard to the game’s
story quite difficult, if not impossible. Players usually don’t enact an ideal
story – at least not in the first playthrough. Take James Bond games, for
example. While you learn how to be as cool, cunning and competent as James
Bond, you normally act like an idiot. Not taking cover when being shot at,
forgetting to reload, getting lost, driving against water hydrants and being
killed – all of this is far from an ideal realization of the James Bond
character (Well Played 1.0 (don't recommend))."

Perhaps the argument could be made that video games give the player agency in
the story in a way books don't so can excel narratively where books can't, but
first of all how many games with a narrative focus really give the player any
meaningful agency? And if I have meaningful agency, I'm writing my own story;
I don't need to think deeply about what the author/designer is saying like
this article advocates.

This essay isn't short, but I think he makes a lot of good points about the
history of the Zelda franchise and argues the next Zelda would be better if it
had no story: <http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/> . Video games can have
value and meaning that transcends narrative structures.

~~~
JenniferFinelli
Hmm, that's a very interesting thought! It made me think: do you think judging
literary vs. cognitive challenges could depend on the genre of the game? I
would be pretty sad if Portal, for example, was judged only as a puzzle game.
That was the idea that turned me off originally when someone described it to
me. As soon as I got the story, though, I became interested, because I like to
analyze.

Could it be possible that some games should be judged primarily by cognitive
challenges, and others by both?

Or, could it be possible that we don't need to judge games at all? o_O

Sounds weird, but this is what I mean. I'm actually in the article never once
talking about evaluating the merit of a game on an objective level. It's not
about judging games so much as judging how we interact with them. I'm talking
about on a personal level, how the game interacts with you, and whether you
find value out of it. If you find value only through area MT, that's a thing,
I guess. But what if we find other ways of connecting our brains to a game--
since the game is affecting those other areas already? On some level, who
really cares about the "literary" or "cognitive" value of the game? On some
level, you and I don't really give a velociraptor's feathers either way what
some arbitrary standard says about a game. We care about how the game affects
us.

What do you think? I dunno, you're very societally-minded here, and that takes
the article beyond what I'd originally intended. Neat! I'm not sure how we
should "judge games," I guess! Just interested in how it gets my brain. ^_^

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simonsarris
Inside this article is a shorter, more positive, more encouraging and less
derogatory article struggling to get out.

"Wonderful ways to think about the games we play" would be a great article. I
want to like this article, but it took too many mean turns. It's not
considerate of all the reasons we play games.

As John McCarthy (AI, Lisp) used to say: "Hard distinctions make bad
philosophy."

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johngalt
This reminds me of a conversation I had about "Hunger Games". My friend
mentioned how implausible it was that people in the future would want to watch
people fight to the death for entertainment. To which I responded 'What do you
think we are doing now? We are watching a movie about people fighting to the
death for our entertainment.'

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fistofjohnwayne
Once I started asking these questions while playing video games I became so
frustrated that I stopped playing them.

~~~
JenniferFinelli
Lol that's why they're intended for before or after, or during conversation
with friends. ^_^ During is a bit over the top. I think if I tried writing a
paper during Supersmash my husband might reconsider our gaming relationship.

Although in Portal and Braid, the game's slow enough to allow for some
thinking time... = P

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anywherenotes
People play for very different reasons.

People play to waste time, to socialize, to take their mind off things, to
role play, to test their skills, to play a role outside their normal role, to
practice English (or whatever their guild is speaking), to feel needed (in
social games), to feel reckless (driving car and spinning out of control with
no consequences). I probably left out hundreds of other reasons people play
video games.

Telling this diverse group of people 'this is how you should play' isn't
productive. You can target one of their goals - lets say the group that wants
to socialize, and say 'make sure your guildies are fun loving people, not a
boring bunch'. Or if the article is targeting role players - make sure the
game is meaningful in some way. But simply saying "What’s the underlying
message or moral with this game" to a group of people that may just be using
the game to play hit-man, isn't very productive.

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xradionut
As a productive adult I spend most of my time seriously. What little
recreation time I have, I choose to enjoy how I please, serious or not. You
can be a completionist in a RPG and finish quests while admiring the graphics
and music or you can spending a evening slaying giants, goats, and elk with
ice spears.

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lubujackson
Nice to see a bit of discussion of thinking about games. This approach is very
similar to how literacy is taught (at the high school level). Not just being
able to read, but to understand complicated writing and its
motivations/intent/effectiveness.

There's obviously some tricky differences, though. For one, each experience of
a game is personalized by the choices made. Games can produce very similar
experiences ("on rails" games) or very different experiences (a bad example
but: playing WoW as one race vs. another can be quite different early on).

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Garoof
Usually when someone writes a piece on taking gaming seriously, I get the
impression that the author does not take gaming very seriously, finds some
other issues to be pretty serious, and thinks that to take gaming seriously is
a matter of relating it to those issues.

Usually those other issues are mostly things I don't take very seriously. So
it kind of comes off like the opposite. Like people should take rocket jumps
and knight forks less seriously, and politics and morals and some faff more
seriously.

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klrr
I play either to be entertained(maintstream games are good at this) or to feed
my need of being competitive(Quake and such games are good at this). All
people don't play games for their artistic value, although many games have a
highly artistic value.

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_pmf_
No.

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Dewie
IMO if a game doesn't make me think about the characters and story after I'm
done with the game, there wasn't much thoughtful art that would appeal to me
there, anyway. Some games are straight up artistic expressions that go beyond
trying to provide immediate fun in the here and now. For those, I naturally
think about what happened in the game while and after I'm done with it.

PS: Video Game Tropes:
[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?f...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VideoGameGenres?from=Main.VideoGames)

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dsschnau
Yeah. I wish but this isn't going to happen.

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burningion
As far as mainstream gaming goes, the main focus has been in distraction and
addiction, using very powerful psychological triggers. (Skinner boxes,
variable ratio reinforcement, social pressure, etc.)

If fact, these triggers have been deeply embedded in our social media too,
turning both video games and social media into tools for manipulating our
emotional selves into cycles of distraction and addiction.

There's billion dollar industries being created and supported on manipulating
the emotional parts of people's brains into using their products for
distraction.

So how the hell do we get back our ability to focus from these incredibly
sophisticated distraction machines?

I've been working the past year on measuring meditation using physical
sensors. My research has resulted in releasing an app to measure and track the
depth of mindfulness meditation using a Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor.

(<http://www.buddhamindapp.com>)

I see games incorporating physical sensors to see what's happening within us
emotionally. With 9.5% of all kids between the ages of 4-17 diagnosed with
ADD, we really need some new tools to fight back against the technology's
creep into our minds.

With the latest update pushed into the app store, we can now measure the depth
of your mindfulness meditation in real time. (By using an algorithm to measure
heart rate variability).

Incorporated with this is a meditation quality score. We're working towards
building a video game that teaches kids the ability to focus, and fights back
against ADD.

So what does this have to do with the quality of games?

I think as the amount of information in our lives continues to explode, the
two main problems for us will be keeping the noise and crap out, and filtering
what we let in.

So those shooters will enter our dreams, we'll dream in their worlds. But what
are they doing for us?

The next breakthrough in gaming is going to be in helping us manage and
explore our minds, to live more optimal lives. It won't be enslaving us
emotionally with achievements and unlocks. At least, I hope not.

~~~
burningion
And to go further, I see games which are already doing this in a positive way.

Take a look at Rocksmith, which gamifies the process of learning to play
guitar, or Dance Central, which can help teach people how to dance.

~~~
Lewisham
I think it's a pretty facile view to take that Rocksmith or Dance Central are
inherently more meaningful because they teach a certain real world skill.

World of Warcraft teaches lots of skills (see work by Joi Ito, like [1]), but
I am sure you would put that in your "demonize" category.

Just like with other mediums like literature and cinema, you get into a lot of
trouble very quickly when you start saying one art piece is worth more than
another. Everything has value, even the most mindless game provides mindless
escapism, and _that is OK_. It is OK to escape for a while.

The problem isn't games. The problem is that we have poor motivational draws
for other life aspects. Try reading some intrinsic motivational theory like
Self-Determination Theory or Reiss 16 Desires.

[1]: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-6048770-7.html>

~~~
burningion
I agree with you here, there are certainly skills to be gained from playing
games, and World of Warcraft could certainly be giving a lot as far as social
interaction, cooperation, and leadership.

Even the horrible example I was thinking of (Call of Duty) has some benefits.

The problem is, I don't see real life ever being as seductive emotionally as
the gaming life. More and more our synthetic realities (video games, social
media) are becoming more emotionally charged than our physical layer of
reality.

Just look at the number of people walking down the street with their faces in
their phones. When they come home it's back to the computers and video games.

Where do we regain the ability to focus in the real world? Or is the constant
distraction the new norm for us as a culture?

~~~
Lewisham
You're not wrong, but the motivational ship has already sailed. However, I'm
sure much the same was said about television and radio before it.

The problem isn't the technology, it's us. However, we've survived OK so far.
Do I think people spend too much time on their phones Wall-E style? Sure. Do I
think it's the phone's fault? No. I think it's an us thing, and we're still
working out how to deal with it.

It wasn't long ago that a social convention was popping up where people would
put their phones on the table and turn them all onto Airplane Mode. We need
new social conventions, but the technology that invades our lives away from
the desk is all very new in the grand scheme of things.

