Skip to main content

Let's Play "Walk Around and Kill People 6"

Recently, to go along with its annual awards, Steam (a platform for buying computer games) released this list of their most played games of 2017. While perusing said list, I came to a somewhat depressing realization: all nine of the games with more than 100,000 peak simultaneous players consisted, at their core, of walking around a 3-dimensional environment and shooting people to death. To some this may fit completely with their view of video games as mindless entertainment which promotes violence. But to me it was jarring, possibly because not one of the twenty games in my Steam library adheres to this formula. In my experience video games can be a fascinating artistic medium, but it is difficult to find the gems in the teeming horde of first-person shooters. The overwhelming popularity of this specific genre has distorted the general public's perception of video games, obscuring the fact that, just like other media such as books or movies, they can be used both to offer an easy, numbing distraction and to create a compelling artistic vision.

If you need examples of how video games can be true art, they certainly do exist. Fallen London has some of the best prose I've ever read, while Sunless Skies and Hollow Knight create powerful atmospheres in a way impossible in any other medium. Portal has one of the most memorable villains in any media, and Undertale is basically this blog post in the form of a video game. There are also plenty of games which have tremendous ability to teach. Kerbal Space Program has given me an intuitive understanding of rocket design and orbital mechanics, and Europa Universalis IV greatly expanded my knowledge of history and geography (side note: my ability to pass Mr. Wong's map tests last year with almost no studying was entirely due to this game). With the existence of games like these in mind, its sad to see that most people would rather just blow things up. I can only hope that as video games mature as a medium, this situation will improve.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do We Really Want the Trump Administration Censoring the Media?

MissRepresentation was an excellent documentary. Before watching it, I was already aware of many of the problems with the representation of women in media which it illuminates, but I was still impressed at how comprehensive and powerful its argument was. However, I disagree with the film on one major point: I do not think that media content should be further regulated by the government or any other organization, even with the purpose of reducing the objectification of women. To see why this kind of regulation could be so problematic, it is helpful to look at the history of media censorship in the United States. From 1930 to 1968, almost all American movies were produced under the  Motion Picture Production Code , a set of rules governing what could be shown onscreen. The rules were intended to safeguard public virtue by eliminating immoral content from the media and were created by the film industry itself to preempt government regulation. While the idea of such a code may seem l...
5 comments
Read more

Hopefully This Play Isn’t Being Graded on the Title

SCENE: A grand stone throne room. Towering statues of past monarchs line the walls in alcoves, most armored and armed for battle. Rows of lanterns, seemingly floating in midair, provide a deep purple light which fails to fully illuminate the huge room’s recesses. In the center, a throne is rigidly carved into an enormous stalagmite which thrusts up through the otherwise flagstone floor. Runic script twines around the tower of rock, and the ancient skull of some gigantic horned beast is impaled on its tip. Stone steps and a smooth walkway lead down from the throne to a simple wooden table awkwardly sitting in the room’s center. It is surrounded by several ordinary chairs and bears an unrolled map, an ornate orrery and two flagons. The floor and walls are intermittently marred with scuff marks and faint bloodstains, as if from a recent battle. AT RISE: OLORIN sits uncomfortably on the edge of the throne, wearing a flowing, verdant green cloak with a burnished gold clasp. His feet are ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mediocre Gatsby

The best protagonist I have yet to encounter in any work of fiction is a character named Taylor Hebert from a web serial called Worm . An introverted teenager with the ability to telepathically control bugs, she becomes a supervillain fairly early on and proceeds to commit a wide variety of morally questionable acts over the course of the story, inflicting unnecessary harm in her desire to seem intimidating and eventually killing several people in an ultimately unjustified bout of rage. However, despite all this Taylor remains a sympathetic and even sincerely relatable character. While her actions are often extreme, they are always performed in service to sympathetic goals, backed by understandable reasoning. The reader can imagine themselves making the same decisions if they were placed in the same situation. The same cannot be said of Jay Gatsby, protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby . His behavior systematically eliminates his appeal to the reader, lessening th...
1 comment
Read more