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It's just a game

tr1age

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In the early 90’s games were “just a game”.

Anyone remember this:

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Or This:

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The games you could sink hours into on a long car ride or session sitting on a friends couch. Even though we seem to buck at the idea of repetitive actions in games these days, that was the same reason it kept us all entertain for hours on end. At the end of our play sessions we were no more or less engaged, but we will always remember them.(kinda like a Britney Spears song)

Sooner than later the Internet was upon us. Our journey to interconnectivity via dial-up modems, beepers with 120 character limits(twitter foresight much?), and eventually cellular phones.



Our ability to be “always online” as things advanced and the internet took shape beyond porn, was going at a blazing pace. I would even say it outpaced our ability to adapt to it and continues to do so.

Without "our approval", which as a gamer, we know it is something we grasp onto strongly; games were no longer cartridges to be blown profusely before placing them in for a gaming session. They were an alternate reality, mimicking our everyday lives. Like life, they were hard to hold onto, feel, or even understand completely, but they played into our yearns and desires to be something greater. They allowed us to be Kings, Queens, and slayers of mighty beasts. The apocalypse scenario we all infatuate ourselves with was right there at our fingertips. The simple combination of mouse and keyboard actions could determine our strength, intelligence, and ability to be something grandiose. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, otherwise shortened to the MMO(RPG) were born.

Our parents had ingrained into our psyche the terminology “It’s just a game” as we argued why we didn’t have to do our homework, eat our dinner, or take out the trash right that very second as we slayed the next epic boss, decorated our virtual house, made sure our Sim had ate and relieved itself. We gave priority to our alter egos easily and willfully. I mean why not? Who wants to be the 14 year old kid who is going through bouts with acne, social awkwardness, and the pressures of studying when we could be so much greater in these virtual worlds. Not only could we achieve “The American Dream” by owning plots of land, traveling to new and exciting places, gaining E-Fame, but we could do it without leaving the basic comforts afforded to us by being home. We nor our parents could have understood that we were literally being given a virtual antibiotic to the human condition. A shortcut to climb the social ladder into the “cloud”. Online Gaming was shaping up to be exactly what we needed, an escape from taxes, bills, school, work, and most importantly reality. It was our wildest dream, fantasy, or desire for a simple monthly fee.

Now fast forward to 2013, the term MMO tagged onto every game out there(for better or worse), virtual items in games gaining real world value, “always online”, voice communications that allow real time interaction with anyone anywhere, graphics making the games more believable or fantastical. Games are more realistic than ever, and what they lack in realism they make up for with fantasy. The child in us, that remains at 14 or 80 years of age, is giddy to escape into these worlds. They are our safety blanket we are unwilling to let go of.

Here is the crux, we didn’t see the fourth wall being broken down on what we were taught as children that, “it is just game” as Social Networking and gaming became one. We now have the ability to communicate in every form one could imagine within these “virtual worlds”, but instead of being just an avatar attached to a name we felt befitting our personalities, we have that avatar, a real life email, Facebook account, twitter account, LinkedIn profile, and various google image searches of our face, real name, and personal moments attached in a neat little package. Add on top of that, the generation of gamers growing up today that have never experienced the anonymity or dis-connectivity we did(yet many follow from our example), and you have a recipe for a lot of angst.

Online games are starting to mimic the “stuff” we used them to escape when I was growing up: social ladders to climb, cliques of players who only allow the “elite” to join, bullying, "Keeping up with the Jone's" attitude toward games or virtual items(so stuck by the idea that theirs is the best that they are not open to the idea of new or different that if another game comes out that might be just as fun for someone else as another game is to you, you get mad and tell them it sucks, afraid it is an inch bigger than your new flatscreen), and a lack of suspensions of disbelief. Games have advanced, but we as a group have not. We shout “It is just a game” as we hold our own piss to make sure our sim pees, unable to see the irony. It isn’t surprising at all that that simple phrase can make a grown man scream at his screen.

When you have a place where you put hours upon hours of work into a virtual version of yourself, more grandiose than yourself, tied to your own name, social media, pictures of your kids, and then someone comes along and kills you, causes drama, or tries to introduce change, of course you are going to get pissed. The dreaded “Patch Notes” are the perfect indicator of how we as humanity, really dislike change. The developers of these games often change things that we will undoubtedly find ways to exploit to further our progression causing them to patch the fixes into the game. You would think, if it is “just a game”, this should be something we accept with open arms, for the better of the game as a whole. The exact opposite is the usual reaction.

We are still brushing off everyone as if they are our parents who just don’t understand that killing this dragon is more important than finishing our homework. That is what the game feels like and as an alternate reality should feel like. It feels bigger than ourselves, but tied very closely to ourselves. We may not even realize that we often mimic our “online personas” in our real lives and vice versa. In a game we are just given a toolset of “power” that we may not have otherwise.

The phrase “It is just a game” has turned from a way to snap us back into reality into a direct attack on who we are. As gaming becomes more ingrained as a valid and acceptable cultural escape, such as going to a movie, taking a smoke break at work, or watching TV on your couch, do we as the gamers need to make a change to make the environment more friendly? Do we need to actively change the way we play to appease the pop culture adapters of our beloved escape? Can we still just blame the outlandish treatment of one another, as gamers, on “being a kid” when we, the 30+ year olds, are the ones spurting the baseless remarks at one another? Is it that we can’t change? Has the crossover of faceless/anonymous avatars to our Facebook picture changed the term “virtual” for these games?

I know this, gaming has moved way past what any of us perceived it could be. On top of that certain games have infiltrated social acceptability in such a way that we are no longer in the shadows. To me this is a good thing. I may not want to accept the fact that I am older, because for the life of me, I still don’t mentally feel a day older than 14. I am still scared of the outcome, I am still curious for the unknown, and I still reach for the stars, but I prefer to not experience that with people who hold onto the idea of “It is just a game” as a crutch to treat others as punching bags, receptacles for their racism, and are happy to brush off those who adopt a vernacular of someone who chooses the path of an uneducated bigot as “children”. We are the “children” playing these games…

I want to embrace the social acceptance of gamers, geeks, nerds. I know when I was younger I couldn’t. I could literally be beat up for talking about a video game. Now it can be a badge of honor! But, how can I personally call myself a gamer when the atmosphere is often toxic. I want to be proud. It isn’t the games or the social stigmas stopping us from being better now, it is us.

So do we make the conscious choice to move forward with the blazing pace of the gaming culture and the responsibility placed on us to be taken seriously as we inject ourselves into the “popular culture”

or…

Is it just a game?
 
Excellent read. This hit home with me on so many levels.

What I've come to realize is each person needs to know who they are before they can be comfortable being that person. I know I am a gamer. I have no qualms letting other people know that. It has certainly gotten easier with the mainstream acceptance of some games. The wide spread adaptation of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft has made it easier for others to accept. Friends and family still have negative reactions when they realize "I spend too much time playing games". However, I know who I am and what I enjoy and I'm not going to let it get in my way.
 
Excellent read. This hit home with me on so many levels.

What I've come to realize is each person needs to know who they are before they can be comfortable being that person. I know I am a gamer. I have no qualms letting other people know that. It has certainly gotten easier with the mainstream acceptance of some games. The wide spread adaptation of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft has made it easier for others to accept. Friends and family still have negative reactions when they realize "I spend too much time playing games". However, I know who I am and what I enjoy and I'm not going to let it get in my way.


I dunno what I consider myself.. maybe I consider myself a theatre geek. Talk about Drama. Badoom Hiss. But ya know what we all had each others backs. We debated the most intense shit. Anyone listening in would think we were the worst of enemies. We admitted if we didn’t like each other. Tempers flared VERY often. But we still all laid on each other in that tiny ass green room on the ONE comfy couch. We knew we all had the same ambitions.

Maybe that is what is lacking in gaming, the lack of tangible real life ambition when you invest your ambitions into a virtual world. Don't get me wrong I am not saying investing in a game is bad. I love it, it is exciting and interesting, beyond our wildest imaginations sometimes, but perhaps we all know in the back of our heads, that time and effort spent on other things in real life could be more long lasting to our lives. So we get angry at ourselves sometimes in the games we invest in, taking it out on one another through a "Those who can't, teach" mentality.


I have mentioned in posts before that when I was young I wouldn't allow myself to stay in on any night of the week where I could go out and play video games. Even though I wanted to, it was not socially acceptable and I was in my hormonal stage, so any moment spent behind a computer was not a moment spent going out looking for my potential wife, which oddly enough would have been impossible because the hormones only allowed me certain brain functionality at that age. (I was a weird 17 year old)

Well I got older, wiser, calmer, less horny(maybe).. haha.

And I understood the relaxation that came from video games. But mind you still multiplayer games. It wasn't until earlier this last year (Alice Madness Returns) and ONCE when Wolfenstein (the latest one) had come out that I played a single player game from start to finish. (Sans the sega saturn games and maybe a Mario here and there when I was way younger).

I feel sometimes there is a social awkwardness in gaming culture due to the secluded way in which we view "our virtual worlds" unable to point to someone and say "HEY LOOK!! DID YOU SEE THAT" in the same way as you would in person, tapping them on the shoulder, with the actual sensations of the world around you to bind it all together.

But I tangent. I guess I just wish, in my experience, I would meet more people like I did on that couch, in that green room, because ultimately I LOVE games, and it makes me sad when I have difficulty finding loud boisterous people to share it with. People that won't think I am writing to tell them HOW IT IS, or WHAT TO DO, but I am sharing a thought, on my mind, at this moment, to share, debate, and have more like it later on when a new thought arises.

Wow I really tangented... <3
 
The problems with gamers in general is, that their interest and even language usually differ so far from "normal" peoples interest that communication becomes difficult.
I can always see this when I talk with my family who is not interested in games at all. They talk about what recently happened around town, what parties were, who was born, who has died etc. and I don´t really care about this. Most of the time I don´t even know who they are talking about. This makes it very difficult to casually talk with them.
On the other hand, if I meet somebody who is a gamer, we talk about our PC specs, our favorite games, favorite game composer etc.
 
I had ones like that baseball hand held when I was younger, cept I had a ninja one and of course like 2 different types of ninja turtles ones. I kept one always in my dads truck so I could play while we were going anywhere. At home I also had an atari and when it broke I got a super nintendo and a gameboy. Then I got a sega genesis for at my moms and got ps1s for both houses so I only had to bring my games back and forth.
 
A lot of people have a problem with people who spend there time playing video games... but those same people all use social media, and in my opinion it is so similar. Rather then go out at night I may go raid with friends, but they will go out and spend 30 seconds every minute on there phone texting other people or posting some status to their page.
 
A lot of people have a problem with people who spend there time playing video games... but those same people all use social media, and in my opinion it is so similar. Rather then go out at night I may go raid with friends, but they will go out and spend 30 seconds every minute on there phone texting other people or posting some status to their page.

And compared to them Gamers usually have a "off" time. A lot of poeple who are using social media, check their phones ALL THE TIME. Sitting at the table with friends, better check my phone. Sitting together with my family, better check my phone. Having a date, better check my phone.

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And compared to them Gamers usually have a "off" time. A lot of poeple who are using social media, check their phones ALL THE TIME. Sitting at the table with friends, better check my phone. Sitting together with my family, better check my phone. Having a date, better check my phone.

I feel the urge to make a meme out of this.

My sisters are totally like that, same with some people that I know. It really bugs me when I am talking to some one and they pull out there phone and start posting something, or checking there text messages.

My friends and myself actually talked about this since they just moved and have been a few weeks without internet! My sister was joking with them on how could they survive without playing games, and we got into this whole discussion. My friends where fine without internet, and even computers since they had other things, but my sister did admit if her phone got taken away for a week she would go crazy....
I think that sums it up, for all the hypocrites who hate on gamers yet they have to have their phones or they can't function!
 
I think the culture of gaming is in transition, becoming more socially acceptable.

Less than 10 years ago, you would be hard pressed find a person over 30 playing, now EVERYONE seems to be doing it. I see ladies in their 50-60's on the bus, just Angry Bird-ing it up. They act like it's this amazing thing that just happened, when 15-20 years ago they were giving their kids a hard time for going to the arcade and wasting money on pinball machines.

The games aren't new, it's the accessibility and the social acceptance that have changed. I make no attempt to "shield" my children from screen time. Games and shows have proven to be very good educational tools. My kids learned the whole alphabet, small letter, caps, and sounds from watching Leap Frog shows and playing games on my iPad.

As we get older, and people in our generation take more power and influence and become grandparents, I think hardcore gaming will become even more mainstream and common among all age groups. By the time my kids are grown, it will be so ingrained that it won't even be questioned anymore. I think we'll see the launch of true eSports in America, complete with dedicated cable channels and regular TV airings in my children's lifetime.

This is the world we live in now, and I say it's about damn time.
 
hmm didn't think about that one, I dont normally think of things like Angry Birds or Candy Crush as gamin, but in reality they are =)t
 
hmm didn't think about that one, I dont normally think of things like Angry Birds or Candy Crush as gamin, but in reality they are =)t

It's definitely gaming, just a difference genre than most here enjoy, at least as a primary distraction. As we age and technology improves, we may be found playing some version of WS on the bus during our golden years.
 
It's definitely gaming, just a difference genre than most here enjoy, at least as a primary distraction. As we age and technology improves, we may be found playing some version of WS on the bus during our golden years.


nOOOOOOOoooOOOooOOO!! I will not get old! Nor take a bus!
 
Considering my favorite genres of games are platformers and jRPGs, I'm still doing the same thing I was as a kid. Playing Mario and Final Fantasy.

Being anti-social in nature means I tend to avoid social media and gaming with other people a lot. I don't even like people watching me play games. Annoys me to no end. MMOs are the odd exception to this for me, and even then I tend to be extremely picky about who I group/play/talk with (hence this group of people).

I've never gotten any issue with playing games. I always went out and hung out with friends a TON growing up and spent all my time at home playing video games or watching cartoons. My few friends also played video games and my school had a class of about 60 people, so I guess I didn't experience a lot of the social trauma people experience in schools nowadays.

As for change: I'm always looking forward to seeing patch notes in an MMO. Patch notes mean change and change means that the game is still being worked on growing. All good signs. If the MMO stops growing and changing, it starts getting boring.

I honestly kind of wish gaming was less popular. Now, I have to deal with crap from people for NOT liking games. "What, you don't like Skyrim? You don't like GTA?!" I mean, really. What kind of pressure is this? Gaming used to be about just doing whatever you wanted and having fun. Now it has... social standards.
 
I honestly kind of wish gaming was less popular. Now, I have to deal with crap from people for NOT liking games. "What, you don't like Skyrim? You don't like GTA?!" I mean, really. What kind of pressure is this? Gaming used to be about just doing whatever you wanted and having fun. Now it has... social standards.


I also have experienced this. "Why are you not playing the most recent CoD?" I usually respond with "It´s a bad game" or "Because I would have to play it with you".

Anyway, I´ve been talking with the people at my work (mostly women) about this topic and they said that they don´t get it, why games are such a big deal. They have tried facebook games and they are not fun. You can guess what I did...*psycho*

I guess there is a 20-40%? group that does not even know that there are other games than facebook games.
This number could be higher, at gamescom I talked with a developer and he mentioned, that "core gamers" (his definition: people who buy more than 1 game per month) are only around 10% of all gamers.
 
I also have experienced this. "Why are you not playing the most recent CoD?" I usually respond with "It´s a bad game" or "Because I would have to play it with you".

Anyway, I´ve been talking with the people at my work (mostly women) about this topic and they said that they don´t get it, why games are such a big deal. They have tried facebook games and they are not fun. You can guess what I did...*psycho*

I guess there is a 20-40%? group that does not even know that there are other games than facebook games.
This number could be higher, at gamescom I talked with a developer and he mentioned, that "core gamers" (his definition: people who buy more than 1 game per month) are only around 10% of all gamers.

The total number of people playing games of any kind has grown dramatically, but I don't think the numbers of core PC and console gamers have. The casual games are also a bit of a distraction to the industry. Why spend years and millions of dollars developing a game when you can throw some sprites together or copy some one else's game and then nickle and dime airheady Facebookers?

For years, the gaming revolutions have always been for core gamers- better systems, graphics, more immersive games. But the last revolution, with the advent of smartphones and tablets, is in casual gaming, which is more about monetizing than pushing the envelope of what games are capable of. The industry has been storming ever since, with hardcore developers trying to capitalize on the new monetizing systems while not completely alienating their player base. The results have been very mixed.
 
The total number of people playing games of any kind has grown dramatically, but I don't think the numbers of core PC and console gamers have. The casual games are also a bit of a distraction to the industry. Why spend years and millions of dollars developing a game when you can throw some sprites together or copy some one else's game and then nickle and dime airheady Facebookers?

For years, the gaming revolutions have always been for core gamers- better systems, graphics, more immersive games. But the last revolution, with the advent of smartphones and tablets, is in casual gaming, which is more about monetizing than pushing the envelope of what games are capable of. The industry has been storming ever since, with hardcore developers trying to capitalize on the new monetizing systems while not completely alienating their player base. The results have been very mixed.


Well the dev said: The best game you can build is one that pleases both casuals and core players. One place where you can put on the screw is by building multiple difficulties, but also stuff like Legend of Grimrock did, where you could turn off automatic mapping, is a good idea. Right now they are in the process of finding this middle ground.
 
Well the dev said: The best game you can build is one that pleases both casuals and core players. One place where you can put on the screw is by building multiple difficulties, but also stuff like Legend of Grimrock did, where you could turn off automatic mapping, is a good idea. Right now they are in the process of finding this middle ground.

A lot of core gamers don't like these changes, though. Look what's happened to WoW. It's super accessible for casual players to see all the content, but it makes the content feel cheapened to core gamers. Sure, they did it on a more difficult setting, but if the rewards aren't commisserant, then it doesn't feel as good. Hardcore gamers want to feel exclusive and set apart by their skill and accomplishments, and then they want to brag about it. If 80% of the server has the achievement for completing the final raid and it's the same achievement on every difficulty level, they feel cheated. Hardcore gamers also don't want to pay huge amounts for a game, so devs are forced to make content for more people to bring in more money.

The other way to equalize the playing field for core and casuals is cash shop. Hardcore gamers can farm and kill bosses and earn their items, casuals that don't have the time or skill can buy them outright. This is called "pay to win" and it pisses core gamers off. In reality, how someone else acquires their items in no way adds or detracts to an individual's accomplishments, but gamers are obsessed with comparing themselves to others. If everyone just enjoyed the game and didn't care how others played, "pay to win" could be a viable model, but gearscore is just too damn important.

I think Carbine is making a lot of right moves; it remains to be seen how well it plays out and is received.
 
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