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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
Interactive games are not new. Tabletop role-playing games are very old, and the war games and miniatures materials that TTRPGs like D&D developed from are still older. The gamebook format is also pretty old, and unfortunately, does not seem to have had any kind of revival in the newer era, other than as interactive applications instead of books. There's still branching-path narrative books that come out here and there, mostly for kids, although there are a few of them that are for adults, like one that's about an exploration of what gender identity (or family of gender identites) a person might claim for themselves.
So it's not a surprise that narrative adventures migrated their way to the computer, and plenty of things that follow a gamebook-like format, were they to be printed, are instead applications. Infocom, for example, with their Z-Machine, produced several highly-acclaimed interactive text adventures, and there were other, simpler, adventures set as programming copying or challenges for computer enthusiasts and people learning programming, like Hunt the Wumpus. From there, visual novels have taken up the charge of the branching-narrative stories in the vein of the Chooseco products, some of which have interactive elements or game-type forms or minigames to them. (And there is also the interesting genre called the kinetic novel, where there are no choices, as such, just a narrative played out in the specific engine that it was constructed in.) There are all kinds of narrative fictions, primarily interactive in text, and where graphics parts or voicing is a very nice addition, but those could be removed and the narrative adventure would still cohere and work from beginning to end (even if some of the more purely visual scenes would have to have a textual rendering.)
I have played these narrative games, both in book form and in application form, and several ones where the tabletop worlds are invoked or used as the setting for the adventure. Mostly, though, when people think about or talk about "video games," they mean things where the visual component is not so easily separated out from the rest of the narrative, adventure, or game.
In previous eras of video gaming, upgrading your console or computer to play the latest games also had the effect of making your computer more able to handle other tasks, run faster, or otherwise improve the performance of the machine for things other than gaming. In the current era, however, it feels a lot more like improvements for games are mostly just improvements for games. And, also, possibly, cryptocurrency mining, which is an economically and ecologically ruinous practice with very little actual purpose. The gamers are pissed that they have to try and outbid the cryptobros for high-end hardware because they want their complex math operations to result in entertainment and faster-than-human frame rates (so they can make sure their rude gestures, emotes, and occasionally gameplay, are as realistic as possible.) I've also found that in video games, there's sometimes a decision that gets made to make pretty games, or games that are meant to be technology demonstrations, or games that are meant only to be played on the very most powerful machines, or that are used to give you an excuse to buy/build a more powerful machine so that you can play them.
The technical aspects of being part of the community of video gamers are mostly uninteresting, even though, yes, I did spend an entire December Days talking about computers and game consoles that included their technical specifications. That series was mostly about the memories that came with those machines, and what I could and did do with them. A fair number of experiences that I have had around gaming are ultimately social ones, even if many of the ones that I've had are ones where I haven't acquitted myself well as a social being, or where I have had to do a lot of brain hacking to get myself out of maladaptive responses. And yet, I still like video gaming. There's a sense of accomplishment that comes from mastery of mechanics or performing difficult and intricate tricks as you understand a game better, or even being able to understand a game and your skill level well enough such that instead of trying to play the game everyone else is playing, you're playing your own game or your own version of the game that's more interesting to you. Yes, even though such mastery is only for pixels or voxels on a screen and it has few real-world applications for most people to spend time doing this. (Or, I suppose, few obvious real-world applications. Some of those games are extremely sneaky in the things that they teach their players that do have application outside of the game world.)
As I've gotten older, I've been able to develop the language skills and descriptive ability to explain what is frustrating me at any given time, rather than mostly having frustrations and not understanding the systems or not being able to succinctly explain when the frustration is "the difficulty has spiked sufficiently that I'm having trouble adjusting to it," when the frustration is "the computer is violating the rules that it enforces for the player and has not indicated that this situation is one where it is allowed to do that," and sometimes where the frustration is "despite supposedly this being a free-for-all, all of the computer players are playing against the human in alliance, they're not being subtle about it, and the RNG is making sure they roll well, to boot." When playing with other players, the frustration is often "well, I wanted to do that thing, but I must have been consistently a few frames late, or at a disadvantage, or I didn't actually put in the input that I wanted to/thought I did." Occasionally it is "There's a clear skill mismatch here, and I'm on the receiving end of being defeated without being able to improve my skills or have something that's more equally matched." I see that frustration at times in my younger players, and may occasionally heavily suggest that the better skill players find each other and leave the less skilled player to their own devices. Or, when I'm playing, specifically interfere in ways that try to keep the higher-skilled players tied up in dealing with me instead of going after others.
Mostly, though, given infinite time and money, I tend to involve myself in long story-driven games for one player, usually with clear mechanics that can be learned and eventually used to great effect. Those games generally lack actual player-versus-player elements, or at least make them optional and don't hide rewards, achievements, or other signifiers behind the PvP content. As alluded to above, there's a culture problem in many games that want to emphasize the player-versus-player or team-versus-team aspects. It usually only makes it to the news when someone does something like sending in a SWAT threat against someone else, or violence erupts outside of games, or when someone is looking for an excuse or something to blame when someone commits an act of mass violence, but I see it at work at work, when people are playing games next to each other, and I'm sure that a whole lot of people have no interest in having voice chat on durig their gaming sessions unless they have to, and even then, it might just be their team voice chat. I know that even in one of the match-3 games that I occasionally drop in on, the general chat channels are muted because they're full of spam and a lot of people behaving poorly.
Unlike legislators, who seem to think they can create prosocial behavior if they can just ban enough things wholesale, I note that a lot of the trash talk, both in person and online, is boys and immature men trying to assert their membership in masculinity to others, or boys and immature men attempting to assert that they have the power to determine what's acceptable behavior and/or what's not manly. Both in how they talk to each other, and how they expect whomever is getting razzed to react or not react to it. There's no way to technologically stop those boys and men from trying to find their place in their world, and a lot of that finding their way involves trying out different things to see what gives them the desired results. Which also means a certain amount of finding out that some of those things get strong negative reactions from others in person, and a fair amount less of finding out about those strong negative reactions from others on-line. With better tools for curating experience, more often than not, there's block buttons being liberally applied or lots of downvoting and other methods that will eventually leave them low socially ranked, although the matchmaking algorithms may or may not take any social rating into account when putting people together for games.
The other secret of video gaming, though, is that there are a lot more women gaming, and that is the kind of thing that makes people who base their masculinity on their gaming abilities very nervous. (I had a different problem - I based my self-worth on my gaming ability, so when it turned out that my skills are much more in finding optimum decisions in systems with time to think than in the ability to read and react in reflex time, I still believed I should be better at gaming than I was. Always someone better there is, and I have run across more than a few of those people in my life.) People who are playing the highly competitive circuit may dismiss a lot of other gamers as casuals or insufficiently gud or not hardcore enough, but the segment of video gaming that is those casuals is way bigger and spends a fair amount more on games and in games than the person with the tricked-out rig waiting for the next AAA release meant to cater to their exact tastes.
As with many things, if video gaming holds an appeal to you, I'd say to pick it up, if you haven't already. While we mostly have the charms of very old gaming consoles and systems in emulation now, those games are also somewhat simpler to pick up and play, with learnable loops and fewer buttons that need pushing. Many of the very old systems are more punishing and less forgiving in their simplicity, though, so there's a balance to be struck between having to keep less in your head and pay attention to less on the screen and a difficulty level in the game where you can make progress and feel like the game itself is enjoyable. And if a certain genre doesn't appeal to you, regardless of how popular it is, you don't have to keep playing it. Even if everyone around you is gushing about how they really like the newest Soulsborne-type game, if what you want is a cozy match-three experience, then find a good match-3 game and play that instead.
Interactive games are not new. Tabletop role-playing games are very old, and the war games and miniatures materials that TTRPGs like D&D developed from are still older. The gamebook format is also pretty old, and unfortunately, does not seem to have had any kind of revival in the newer era, other than as interactive applications instead of books. There's still branching-path narrative books that come out here and there, mostly for kids, although there are a few of them that are for adults, like one that's about an exploration of what gender identity (or family of gender identites) a person might claim for themselves.
So it's not a surprise that narrative adventures migrated their way to the computer, and plenty of things that follow a gamebook-like format, were they to be printed, are instead applications. Infocom, for example, with their Z-Machine, produced several highly-acclaimed interactive text adventures, and there were other, simpler, adventures set as programming copying or challenges for computer enthusiasts and people learning programming, like Hunt the Wumpus. From there, visual novels have taken up the charge of the branching-narrative stories in the vein of the Chooseco products, some of which have interactive elements or game-type forms or minigames to them. (And there is also the interesting genre called the kinetic novel, where there are no choices, as such, just a narrative played out in the specific engine that it was constructed in.) There are all kinds of narrative fictions, primarily interactive in text, and where graphics parts or voicing is a very nice addition, but those could be removed and the narrative adventure would still cohere and work from beginning to end (even if some of the more purely visual scenes would have to have a textual rendering.)
I have played these narrative games, both in book form and in application form, and several ones where the tabletop worlds are invoked or used as the setting for the adventure. Mostly, though, when people think about or talk about "video games," they mean things where the visual component is not so easily separated out from the rest of the narrative, adventure, or game.
In previous eras of video gaming, upgrading your console or computer to play the latest games also had the effect of making your computer more able to handle other tasks, run faster, or otherwise improve the performance of the machine for things other than gaming. In the current era, however, it feels a lot more like improvements for games are mostly just improvements for games. And, also, possibly, cryptocurrency mining, which is an economically and ecologically ruinous practice with very little actual purpose. The gamers are pissed that they have to try and outbid the cryptobros for high-end hardware because they want their complex math operations to result in entertainment and faster-than-human frame rates (so they can make sure their rude gestures, emotes, and occasionally gameplay, are as realistic as possible.) I've also found that in video games, there's sometimes a decision that gets made to make pretty games, or games that are meant to be technology demonstrations, or games that are meant only to be played on the very most powerful machines, or that are used to give you an excuse to buy/build a more powerful machine so that you can play them.
The technical aspects of being part of the community of video gamers are mostly uninteresting, even though, yes, I did spend an entire December Days talking about computers and game consoles that included their technical specifications. That series was mostly about the memories that came with those machines, and what I could and did do with them. A fair number of experiences that I have had around gaming are ultimately social ones, even if many of the ones that I've had are ones where I haven't acquitted myself well as a social being, or where I have had to do a lot of brain hacking to get myself out of maladaptive responses. And yet, I still like video gaming. There's a sense of accomplishment that comes from mastery of mechanics or performing difficult and intricate tricks as you understand a game better, or even being able to understand a game and your skill level well enough such that instead of trying to play the game everyone else is playing, you're playing your own game or your own version of the game that's more interesting to you. Yes, even though such mastery is only for pixels or voxels on a screen and it has few real-world applications for most people to spend time doing this. (Or, I suppose, few obvious real-world applications. Some of those games are extremely sneaky in the things that they teach their players that do have application outside of the game world.)
As I've gotten older, I've been able to develop the language skills and descriptive ability to explain what is frustrating me at any given time, rather than mostly having frustrations and not understanding the systems or not being able to succinctly explain when the frustration is "the difficulty has spiked sufficiently that I'm having trouble adjusting to it," when the frustration is "the computer is violating the rules that it enforces for the player and has not indicated that this situation is one where it is allowed to do that," and sometimes where the frustration is "despite supposedly this being a free-for-all, all of the computer players are playing against the human in alliance, they're not being subtle about it, and the RNG is making sure they roll well, to boot." When playing with other players, the frustration is often "well, I wanted to do that thing, but I must have been consistently a few frames late, or at a disadvantage, or I didn't actually put in the input that I wanted to/thought I did." Occasionally it is "There's a clear skill mismatch here, and I'm on the receiving end of being defeated without being able to improve my skills or have something that's more equally matched." I see that frustration at times in my younger players, and may occasionally heavily suggest that the better skill players find each other and leave the less skilled player to their own devices. Or, when I'm playing, specifically interfere in ways that try to keep the higher-skilled players tied up in dealing with me instead of going after others.
Mostly, though, given infinite time and money, I tend to involve myself in long story-driven games for one player, usually with clear mechanics that can be learned and eventually used to great effect. Those games generally lack actual player-versus-player elements, or at least make them optional and don't hide rewards, achievements, or other signifiers behind the PvP content. As alluded to above, there's a culture problem in many games that want to emphasize the player-versus-player or team-versus-team aspects. It usually only makes it to the news when someone does something like sending in a SWAT threat against someone else, or violence erupts outside of games, or when someone is looking for an excuse or something to blame when someone commits an act of mass violence, but I see it at work at work, when people are playing games next to each other, and I'm sure that a whole lot of people have no interest in having voice chat on durig their gaming sessions unless they have to, and even then, it might just be their team voice chat. I know that even in one of the match-3 games that I occasionally drop in on, the general chat channels are muted because they're full of spam and a lot of people behaving poorly.
Unlike legislators, who seem to think they can create prosocial behavior if they can just ban enough things wholesale, I note that a lot of the trash talk, both in person and online, is boys and immature men trying to assert their membership in masculinity to others, or boys and immature men attempting to assert that they have the power to determine what's acceptable behavior and/or what's not manly. Both in how they talk to each other, and how they expect whomever is getting razzed to react or not react to it. There's no way to technologically stop those boys and men from trying to find their place in their world, and a lot of that finding their way involves trying out different things to see what gives them the desired results. Which also means a certain amount of finding out that some of those things get strong negative reactions from others in person, and a fair amount less of finding out about those strong negative reactions from others on-line. With better tools for curating experience, more often than not, there's block buttons being liberally applied or lots of downvoting and other methods that will eventually leave them low socially ranked, although the matchmaking algorithms may or may not take any social rating into account when putting people together for games.
The other secret of video gaming, though, is that there are a lot more women gaming, and that is the kind of thing that makes people who base their masculinity on their gaming abilities very nervous. (I had a different problem - I based my self-worth on my gaming ability, so when it turned out that my skills are much more in finding optimum decisions in systems with time to think than in the ability to read and react in reflex time, I still believed I should be better at gaming than I was. Always someone better there is, and I have run across more than a few of those people in my life.) People who are playing the highly competitive circuit may dismiss a lot of other gamers as casuals or insufficiently gud or not hardcore enough, but the segment of video gaming that is those casuals is way bigger and spends a fair amount more on games and in games than the person with the tricked-out rig waiting for the next AAA release meant to cater to their exact tastes.
As with many things, if video gaming holds an appeal to you, I'd say to pick it up, if you haven't already. While we mostly have the charms of very old gaming consoles and systems in emulation now, those games are also somewhat simpler to pick up and play, with learnable loops and fewer buttons that need pushing. Many of the very old systems are more punishing and less forgiving in their simplicity, though, so there's a balance to be struck between having to keep less in your head and pay attention to less on the screen and a difficulty level in the game where you can make progress and feel like the game itself is enjoyable. And if a certain genre doesn't appeal to you, regardless of how popular it is, you don't have to keep playing it. Even if everyone around you is gushing about how they really like the newest Soulsborne-type game, if what you want is a cozy match-three experience, then find a good match-3 game and play that instead.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 07:04 pm (UTC)After you complete X number of quests in the festival area, you're told the town mayor wants to talk to you. It seems that he's been skimming town funds and wants you to beat up the leader of the beggars. You're given a choice. You can lure the two people outside of town and beat the snot out of them, or you can talk to them and they'll tell you that there's a location further outside of town where a guard protects an accountant where the money is kept.
So you have an actual moral decision to make: support the mayor's theft, or expose it. And they're mutually exclusive decisions - for the year. When the festival event starts again the following year, you can do the other path if you want.
There's another daily repeatable quest where you drive off the beggars. I don't do that one. And a quest where you give the beggars festival tokens that you've earned. All sorts of interesting little quandaries. It's one of the very rare, if not only, places in the game where you have to make a moral decision.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-12 08:34 pm (UTC)I think it's up to 16 or 17 years, they'll be having their anniversary event next year. I just looked at Wikipedia: launched in April of '07, so next year will be 18. I really like decision tree decision-making: start down this fork and it excludes certain quests that others might have taken, but gives you certain quests that others can't take. But that's a level that they don't employ. Their game engine is pretty creaky: no matter how new your CPU, it only uses one core. I'm sure their code has huge gobs of cruft that needs to be refactored.