

Why do games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame? - ivankirigin
http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/269124967/hi-my-name-is-mike-and-i-was-a-fishville-addict

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onewland
Part of it, I think, is the lack of imagination factor (on the part of the
person playing the game). Movies try to get you to look at the world
differently; books make you conjure up your own imagery to match the text.
Comic books even force you to imagine the voices of the characters, their
motions and motivations.

Video games give you a very well-defined, discrete rule system. You are X
character with Y motivation trying to achieve Z goal. If you don't achieve Z
goal, you lose. If you achieve Z goal, you win. Winning Z goal means nothing
in the "real world". Chuck Klosterman[1] described video games as similar to
masturbation; there's a sense of achievement, but the feeling of gratification
can be very shallow.

That said, I think there are video games that are more conducive to creative
and interesting behavior than many books, just as there are many TV shows that
inspire better thinking and creativity than mediocre movies. As another poster
said, it will take time for the stigma of "video game brain-rot" to end.

[1] He's a pop-culture commentator with no real expertise in this, but I
wanted to credit his analogy.

~~~
oconnor0
There's some truth in Klosterman's analogy, but I think it misses the point
that much of other entertainment/art (in movies, TV shows, books, etc.)
doesn't push you to think differently than you do. It simply feeds some
emotional or whatever need - like masturbation. Don't get me wrong, I think
this is ok.

But I think where games need to go if they want increased legitimacy is to
develop games that cause you to think differently about the world. That ask
questions without simple answers. I think it'll be hard because of the
interactivity of games, but I think it's necessary.

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tibbon
This is a very good question. I think we have stereotypes of people who are
'too in' to games and we've all probably known one of them.

I know one thing that many people don't like about (most) games is that they
are engrossing and not easily interruptible. You can't "pause" your WoW Raid
to go have dinner. There's no DVR. People seem more accepting of sports for
sure, even though they are often engrossing and encourage poor behavior (just
watch the people outside Fenway after a game and then tell me hardcore WoW
raiders are bad...) Also the fact that you can spent more than 2-3 hours on
them at a stretch easily gets to some people.

Some people view games as anti-social because they don't always require others
in the room, even if you're interacting virtually.

I know that when I was single a few months ago, I kept seeing women on dating
sites saying, "No gamers", but then they'd go to list the books, movies,
sports and TV shows they liked.

Its my free time and I do what I want with it. The last two companies I've
worked for (GamerDNA and imVOX) have been gaming related and its been great. I
kinda love it actually. I don't watch any television shows, or sports. I
rather like music and almost always have it playing. But games are something I
find highly interactive and fun.

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pohl
_Somehow people who play games a lot get some kind of shame and then label it
a crazy addiction. I’m not sure I really understand or care to understand the
cultural elitism._

I don't understand; I don't care to understand; I just want to rant about it.

Addiction is intentionally built into games. Klondike Solitaire probably hit
on it by accident, but Everquest, WoW, and Farmville were built to
intentionally exploit the pleasure system to secure hours upon hours of
attention. Other games do this to a lesser extent, but there is always a
payoff for some interval of play.

Contrast this with comics, which are designed to, at worst, exploit the human
tendency to fetishize particular reappearing characters. The latest issue of
_Captain Amazing_ may hold your attention for a while, but there is no built-
in active mechanism triggering dopamine hits in a regular basis. Television
would come the closest, and that is similarly maligned by elitists who want
the whole world to know that they don't even own a TV.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this aspect of games, but it
definitely puts games in a different category than the other forms of
entertainment that Nabeel is holding up for comparison. I'm surprised this
isn't obvious.

~~~
electromagnetic
Games, especially MMO's and Social Gaming exploit their addictiveness to keep
people paying them.

Certain TV shows exploit similar addictiveness. CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New
York, NCIS, NCIS: Los Angeles, Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, Law & Order:
Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury . . . all still supplying ~24 new
episodes a year during prime time slots. To put it roughly, 9 _days_ worth of
programming that is essentially identical. Then there's the more unique (to
some degree) procedurals (IE NUMB3RS, Castle, etc. Incidentally, the only
procedurals I like, I can't stand the CSI crap as my mind is violently raped
by unscience almost every other episode I watch) that appear.

I personally did stop watching TV for a prolonged period, but for no elitist
reason as I love TV . . . perhaps too much. However, I'm satisfied watching
_only_ the show, so I'm more a DVD person.

Movies, again, strike at this addictiveness with the 'unnecessary sequels'
market. It's one thing when a movie plans multiple parts, a la the Borne
trilogy. However, then there are the Bond series that maybe only hit a good
movie every 3rd or 4th produced, but still take in millions. Then there are
the totally unnecessary sequels that appear because the studios dangled
hundreds of millions of dollars off an ACME sized mousetrap to bag a producer.

Books similarly can get into this trouble of unnecessary sequels. I believe
Agatha Christie inadvertently suffered this problem as her publishers forbid
her from killing off Poirot, it took her 40 years for the novel that killed
him off to be published.

Ironically, the most addictive TV shows and books appear to be detective
dramas. This is easily illustrated by the fact that Mystery/Crime novels is
the biggest market in literature, and by the fact there are over 9 procedurals
routinely running during prime time slots, year after year for almost a
decade.

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simonw
Please use permalinks, or older Hacker News threads won't make sense.

~~~
selven
Copied the text down here:

<http://pastebay.com/74435>

~~~
wmf
That's not the correct solution; the blog itself has perfectly good
permalinks: [http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/269124967/hi-my-name-is-mike-
and...](http://nabeelhyatt.com/post/269124967/hi-my-name-is-mike-and-i-was-a-
fishville-addict)

------
stuartjmoore
Video games are still very new. The people who grew up with the first consoles
are what... 30 or 40 now?

Culture doesn't change over night. Give it a few more generations.

~~~
electromagnetic
I agree, but I also believe the market has to change. I worked as a reviewer
for video games, movies and TV series, and I have to say video games are
exceptionally lacklustre in the story department.

The biggest video game franchises (excluding the sport franchises) all have
massive stories behind them. Virtually every FPS touts '10 hours of gameplay'
as if it's a good thing. They're essentially an _exceptionally_ long movie
that's so deficient in story that if it were alive, it would have died from
malnutrition. RPG games exhibit masses of story, sometimes unbelievable
amounts for a video game, which is ideally where games should be headed.

A unique immersive single player games, like Mass Effect, GTA, Final Fantasy,
Fable, etc, all seem to turn into huge franchises. The sand-box nature of many
of these games then enables the whole creativity aspect to enter as people
begin to play things like a puzzle. FPS's tend to use multiplayer competition
to keep themselves played after the campaign is completed, although notably
many of these games barely have a single player built in.

WoW is purely designed to be addictive, it appears to serve no other purpose
due to the "oh you're a good boy, +1 level" rewards it deals out. Before WoW I
never heard of games being 'addictive'. I heard about people playing games way
too much, in fact I likely did, but that usually abated with boredom during
the off seasons (incidentally the movie seasons).

------
etherael
Games are one of the only pursuits that actually allow you to experience that
you've accomplished something, and in fact they're all designed to do so, and
it's neatly packaged in such a way that you can be certain it's possible for
you to experience at least a set sequence of accomplishments.

Couple that with complete abstraction from "the real world" and they are
capable of producing the type of persona that is immune to accusations of
uselessness / slacking, the person in question constantly gets their "I did
stuff" buttons pushed by their in game accomplishments, despite accomplishing
very little in the real world.

The only other pursuit where this springs to mind is sport, and sport has been
around long enough that culture has adjusted to it, and in some cases actually
translates sporting achievements into real life achievements. South Korea is
already taking this tack to a degree with video games, and with professional
gaming leagues, etc, you can see it's probably the way that the pursuit will
develop / integrate with mainstream culture eventually.

Speaking for myself, I've been absorbed in games at times, the degree to which
this absorption is expressed is inversely proportional to my satisfaction with
the real world at any given time. I think culture proper doesn't like the idea
that "gamers" may be a group mostly capable of not caring what culture thinks
about them.

