Why not? (Gaming)

by Kermit , Raleigh, NC, Monday, March 19, 2018, 14:29 (2442 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

Very separate from my conversation with you, Kermit, I just wish people in general were a little more open to stepping outside their usual comfort zones to experience cool things. I don't typically read comics, but if a friend of mine is telling me that he's reading this great comic and I should really check it out, I go buy the comic and read it for myself. I don't say "I'll just wait for them to make a movie out of it". Same actually goes for TV shows. As a rule, I watch zero Television day to day, unless there is a specific show that I'm interested in seeing. I totally get that people all have preferences for certain types of media or entertainment, and I'm no different. But if someone creates something that everyone says is awesome, I want to experience it even if its not in a form that I typically digest. To me that's just part of enjoying art and entertainment. I assume the creator(s) chose that specific medium for a reason, and sometimes that reason ends up being crucial to what they've created.

I'm with you. I already mentioned my friend who unsuccessfully tried to play TLoU at my request. I have a number of friends who are connoisseurs of great stories, and my selfish reason for wanting a good TLoU movie is so that they can experience that story (I don't think its greatness is dependent on how things are revealed in gameplay, although you do a great job in explicating that.) As is, the story is behind an insurmountable barricade (for several of my friends). I know they'd appreciate it if they could experience it, but modern video games (and the vocabulary and skill necessary to get through them) just aren't in their wheelhouse.

Videogames live in a funny space though, don't they? They're much more demanding than most other forms of entertainment. We never need to say things like "well if you haven't been watching movies for the past 15 years, you can't just jump in and watch this movie". I can't think of anything else quite like it, really. It would be like saying "Here's a piece of music to listen to, but you won't be able to hear it unless you know how to play piano".

I wonder if the way gaming has evolved will lead to a kind of bubble that will inevitably burst? As in, games will continue to get more and more advanced but the number of "hardcore" gamers will continue to fall until there are hardly any left? I don't know how much study has been done in this area, but I remember hearing a couple years back that big publishers were already starting to worry about the fact that younger generations just weren't buying games the way previous generations have. I know that Minecraft has caused a fair deal of stress about the future, as a large portion of the playerbase bought Minecraft and then never bought another game. So rather than being a sign of young people getting into videogames, Minecraft IS videogames for a lot of kids and pre-teens out there. And as they fall off Minecraft, its not clear that they pick up other games in its place.

It all makes me wonder if modern games are evolving past the point where kids will be able to just jump on and get the hand of things as they currently are. I know with my own daughter, finding games she can play is far more challenging than it was for me to find games I could play at the age of 4. We play Mario Kart together, but that's only because a) there are settings in the Switch version that make the game practically play itself, and b) a single joycon is the perfect size for her tiny hands... anything larger, she just can't manage it.

When I was her age, I was able to boot up my Atari and jump into a game by myself, no problems. Just turn it on, hit the one and only button on the controller, and I was up and running. But games now have all these layers of menus and options before you even get to the game. Forget my daughter being able to set up Mario Kart by herself, my ex wife can't even do it for her.

I wonder if somewhere along the line, we'll get a classic-style console with all the simplicity of an SNES, but something actually current (rather than a reissue or emulator). Because part of me thinks that video games are complicating themselves into the realm of obscurity by making themselves too complex for new players to ever jump on board.

Maybe there's something to that but I can't help but suspect that your experience with your daughter in comparison with your own is more a reflection of an individual proclivity. The kids I'm around ramp up pretty quickly. Bigarm's teenage son intuitively gets the rules of complex games pretty effortlessly--definitely quicker than I do. He has a fluency I'll never have (I use that word because I used the word "vocabulary" earlier). His little sister (a bit older than your daughter) is no slouch.

As with learning to be fluent in anything, nothing beats immersion. We don't talk about movie accessibility the way you describe because almost all of us have been immersed with that kind of visual story telling since childhood simply through exposure to TV. But someone in 1910 would understand little about Goodfellas or Pulp Fiction and would probably be traumatized if exposed to those films. Early film viewers had reactions not too different than many folks have to VR now. They grew nauseated, fainted, or fell out of their chairs. The language of film has matured, too. For myself, the range of movies I could appreciate expanded significantly after taking film classes, which of course increased my "fluency."