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.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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 ...

Unconventional = Good

Anyone who analyzes enough entertainment media quickly begins to notice a few patterns. Every story has a (usually white and male) protagonist who, along with his band of supporting characters, faces some kind of conflict, defeats the villain, and lives happily ever after. This is (an oversimplified summary of) the Hero's Journey, that pervasive force which consigns so many stories to the dustbin of sameness. This common theme makes all media somewhat similar, but within specific genres there are many more of these similarities, so much so that one quickly realizes that the vast majority of stories are just a bunch of prefabricated parts assembled in a predictable order with a new coat of paint slapped on to trick people into thinking its something different. For evidence of this, I direct you to go to  TV Tropes , an incredible database of fictional tropes (common elements found in many different pieces of media). Once you're there, find the page of a movie you like and scroll...

An Objection to Merchants of Cool

I generally found Merchants of Cool  to be quite insightful, but on one point I found it rather hyperbolic. One of the experts interviewed as part of the documentary compared American teens to Africa and the corporations marketing to them to European imperialists. The essential problem with this analogy is that modern teens can choose not to be exploited. The inhabitants of Africa could not simply decide to not be affected by Western conquest, but to a degree we can choose to do exactly that. The mook will always exist as a stereotype in media marketed to teenagers, but I can (and do) choose not to watch that media. (In my case this really isn't even that difficult, as I find the kind of media inhabited by mooks to be quite boring). Likewise, the fact that what is fashionable is chosen by a few large corporations doesn't really matter to someone (like me) whose clothing decisions don't factor in what's "cool" on any given day. It's certainly possible to be...