Thank you for your help with the Dragon Age thing. I’m pretty sure the elf costume hasn’t scarred me for life. Yet.
I have another question. I really enjoy video game commentary. Tom Bissell’s book, “Extra Lives” was pretty good; I check in on Zero Punctuation now and then; even Penny Arcade sometimes fascinates me.
But I don’t really like to play video games. A little Super Mario Wii with my kids is more than enough. I can’t take the grind of the RPG. A sandbox world where I could do “anything” would just emphasize to me that I’d rather not be playing a game in the first place.
How can I be interested in game commentary but not in playing the games themselves?
Yours,
Human Hireling
Dear Human Hireling,
The first answer to mind is, of course, “well, you just haven’t found the right one!” and to point out a handful of genres you may not have experienced from the popcap “just for a couple minutes” games to some of the more experimental games out there like Shadow of the Colossus to masterpieces of genres that you probably haven’t been properly introduced to (like Planescape: Torment or the original Fallout).
Then I see “A little Super Mario Wii with my kids” and things sort of reshuffle themselves in my mind. Video games are similar to Las Vegas insofar as someone without a whole lot of life experience and looking at things in the dark of night might say “wow! this is bright and shiny!” but, in broad daylight, things look kind of… well, fake. The idea of going through and meeting some arbitrary difficult goal is much more fun for children (especially children not especially challenged by our school system) than it is for adults who quite regularly have to meet arbitrary and difficult goals all day. Having eaten the fruit of the proverbial tree of knowledge of good and evil, adults can’t go back into the Edenic land where they can take pleasure in the same things that they could as children… and the irony is having children makes this line starker.
Then I remember my Ginsburg and say “first thought, best thought” and I figure that you just haven’t found the right game and your enjoyment of reading about them is your brain scratching you and telling you that the right one is just around the corner.
You’ve mentioned having a Wii. Have you tried Okami?
I hope that helped.
Jaybird
I’d be interested to know what games you’ve played, and what it is about video game commentary that you finds interesting? Is it seeing them as narrative art? As input/output constructs? I think this is interesting because I find the overwhelming portion of video game commentary abominable.
Did you ever enjoy them? Did he you play them at all as a youngster?
I think it’s very true that most “maintstream” games (and a huge percentage of indies) are so thoroughly meta that I don’t know how adults get into games without having grown up with them.
Yes, I played them as a kid and I sometimes play them now. I just find that they often leave me feeling blah. The last game I played that I really liked was Portal, and I played with my wife. We have just barely started Portal 2, so I have some hopes for that.
Thinking about this more, I think that the video game commentary works on my imagination in a way I find more fulfilling than the games themselves. The commentary provides a structure and a framework for thinking about games which I can fill out using my imagination. I find the game I concoct in my mind is more interesting than the game I encounter on the screen.
It’s like that with tabletop RPGs, too. Reading the rules and settings and daydreaming about what could happen is always more interesting than what actually happens. It’s not always more fun, because if you play with cool people, it’s fun to just get around the table and play. But the world of possibilities is more compelling to me than the realized world of most games.
Portal 2, I found, benefitted from one thing primarily:
There were a number of areas where your job was to walk from point A to point B and it was more or less obvious that there wasn’t much interesting going on that didn’t involve either point A or point B. Given that they knew about how long it took to get from here to there, they put together a monologue for someone to read to you whilst you walked.
The monologues are very, very good.
That, I found, was the highlight of Portal 2. (“Who wants sixty dollars?”)
When it comes to games that are as interesting as the world they inhabit? I think I can fall back on Torment and the original Fallout… I think. Those are more like interactive books (choose your own adventures) than video games proper, however. (Of course, the RPG is my hands-down favorite genre.)
I’ll dig for something that I think will work for you…
Well, I think you have it reversed, the Point A to Point B sequences exist for you to hear the monologue they’ve written, they weren’t written to fill in the gaps. Most of the levels you take a short walk in and out with a short comment or two from Wheatly/GLaDOS/Cave. When they wanted to do a longer bit, they had you take the long route between chambers instead.
Well, that too.
That’s interesting. I also always preferred reading sourcebooks to actually playing the game for similar reasons, and shortly after realizing that I stopped playing tabletop games altogether.
Since then I also found myself uninterested in the narrative type games, be they on rails or sandbox-types. Mostly I went over to games where you compete against others/AIs (multiplayer FPS games, RTS/strategy games) or where there is no/minimal plot (puzzlers, oddball platformers, worldbuilding games). You might try exploring some of those and see if they does anything for you.
Surprised you didn’t mention anything about Randy Savage. It’s not like he’s Hogan.
Then again this can be chalked up to my assumption that you juggle.
Sorry about that.
I don’t know that I could get an essay out about it.
It’s not like Benoit’s death that exposed the seedy underside of the business.