Why do games as an entertainment medium elicit this kind of cultural shame?
nabeelhyatt.com
nabeelhyatt.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the idea that games have some kind of special power that other things don't have is exactly the kind of bogus thinking I was trying to talk about. Almost EVERY piece of entertainment, especially mass entertainment, is designed to make you love it/spend your money/come back/buy the tshirt/tell your friends/get the happy meal.
Sports are built, and largely exploit, the innate sense of tribalism that our brains have developed. Fiction, whether comics or movies, is designed to make us feel a stronger and purer set of emotions (whether sexuality or comedy or power) than we can readily get at the drop of a hat on a Thursday at 7:30pm. It's a crack shot of an emotion that we want to feel.
It's just no one talks about it that way. Because it's okay to say, "I want to laugh, I'm going to a comedy instead of actually talking with my friends and engaging with them and telling jokes." Whereas doing the same with a game is somehow horrific.
Culture doesn't change over night. Give it a few more generations.
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).
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.