the7k wrote:Have you ever thought that the reason many of the most well known video games are violent and aggressive is because violence is a strength of the medium? In just the same way that story and narration is a weakness of the medium, for pretty much the same reason?
In my opinion, interactivity is the medium’s strength. There are many games that have garnered critical acclaim that are not overly violent.
Violence isn’t a strength of the medium either. Rather, it’s a popular limitation imposed on it by the developers, who seem to know few other ways of including player action towards story conflict resolution.
the7k wrote:A movie, for example, has to do a lot of work to get you to feel adrenaline during an action scene and, especially with modern movies, they don't usually succeed. Because that person isn't us. We are observers. We can appreciate the character and their relationships, but feeling any sort of primal urges that the character is supposed to be feeling is rare.
Indeed, moviemakers have to work hard to coerce audiences to feel the characters’ emotions. The way an actor/actress portrays a certain emotion or action helps audiences emphasise with the character/s. A composer uses specific musical cues at precise moments to elicit a particular emotional audience response. A director frames a shot a particular way to cause audiences to react in a specific way. A screenwriter uses certain dialogue and character actions over the course of a story to help audiences empathise with their characters and feel a particular way about them at certain points of the narrative. If you would like further evidence on how movies create audience response, I suggest reading some David Bordwell.
I disagree that films don’t succeed in creating an audience-character connection. Otherwise, why would visual storytelling be so popular? Audiences watch films and TV shows to connect with characters and feel for them.
Like you imply, games have the potential to be more affective since players take control of the protagonist and, through their actions and decisions, becomes them. Hence, interactivity, rather than violence, is their strength.
In the past, connecting with characters in games was clunkier because of the medium’s lack of storytelling finesse, usually down to the medium’s restrictions at the time. Many games only offered a brief story in the manual and players had to use their imaginations to fill in the rest (not that this was necessarily bad, given the medium’s limitations in the past). Fortunately (or not, depending on your point of view) this is changing.
Exhuminator wrote:Why would someone "grow out of stuff like FPS"? Are you implying the genre is inherently childish?
I’m male and to be honest I’ve outgrown the genre. I can go back and play the classics from my adolescence, like
Doom,
Duke 3D,
Quake, etc, but modern FPS overly emphasise realism. Hunting down and killing realistic looking enemies, to me, is very repellent. It’s almost as if the developers are glorifying this sort of behaviour. Perhaps this is one reason why female gamers, in general avoid the genre.
As for whether the genre is childish, that depends on your opinion on war and violence in general.
Exhuminator wrote: Tempest wrote: What is it that makes violence and aggression so appealing to male gamers?
The implication being that these elements are not appealing to female gamers. When in reality there are female gamers who do find these elements appealing, as we've discussed in detail since.
It wasn’t my intention to imply that violence doesn’t appeal to female gamers, only that it is more appealing to male gamers, who, let’s be honest, drive this industry and have done since its conception. If females had been those who had championed gaming instead of males would there be no violent games? Unlikely. But I imagine violence wouldn’t be the dominant form of player action in games.
BoringSupreez wrote:What I was saying is that males have a natural tendency to like violence, which manifests itself through the videogames we play. Females may find violence appealing as well, as there are girl gamers who pay Fallout or Dark Souls or whathaveyou. But it's a predominantly male fascination, as the article referencing the WoW statistics shows.
Thank you. I agree completely.
