N'Al on 9/11/2015 at 19:30
I'm still hoping for an A-Team game where shooting at someone means hitting the conveniently placed explosive barrel next to them, with the resulting explosion merely knocking them unconscious instead.
TannisRoot on 9/11/2015 at 21:47
Quote Posted by Abysmal
It happened after the death of the adventure game
Umm no...
Zork had killing in it, albeit as a puzzle solution. That was one of the earliest adventure games.
There are many more examples of 80s games with killing: Rogue, hack, wizardry, Moria, MUDs (basically chat rooms where you could slay monsters and equip items).
froghawk on 9/11/2015 at 22:10
Quote Posted by heywood
Well, the glorification of gun violence has been a Hollywood thing right from the beginning. And Hollywood started out catering to an American audience before reaching the rest of the world. So I think the public appetite for guns in entertainment media might have started in America, but it didn't stay there.
Sure, but if you look at other power fantasies like all of the superhero movies that are so popular these days, almost none of them feature mass murderer protagonists with guns. So films have moved on. They don't make many movies like Commando anymore, short of Tarantino and zombie films with a high undead body count.
Pyrian on 9/11/2015 at 23:29
Quote Posted by froghawk
Sure, but if you look at other power fantasies like all of the superhero movies that are so popular these days, almost none of them feature mass murderer protagonists with guns.
They certainly
do mow down endless waves of mooks, frequently with ranged weapons. The weapons being not necessarily guns and the mooks being not necessarily human beings is really the weakest way of turning the mass murder into metaphor. Cripes, Avengers outright nuked an alien staging zone.
Yakoob on 9/11/2015 at 23:58
I'm with Pyrian, I think game's obsession with violence is more of a reflection of our nature/culture, rather than the other way around. Thirith brings up a good point about Japan and how different it is there due to cultural reasons. Even in JRPGs, killing someone in battle rarely means killing them in real life (as has been mocked ad nauseam).
Quote Posted by nicked
Falling back on killing happens because it is the absolute easiest way to add challenge to a game, by a strong margin. I discovered this first-hand when trying to design Wheelbound (see my (
https://nickdablin.wordpress.com/) website for more info). Designing levels and challenges for a character who can't fight back, only avoid, is 100 times harder to do.
Hmm, interestingly, I found the opposite on Karaski. I Was kinda glad when I decided to scrap a lethal option as it was one less "variable" to worry about, and I Could just focus on the other ways of getting past guards. But Karaski has always been more of an immersive sim than an FPS, so perhaps it just landed itself more easily to excluding killing than your case.
Quote:
- Player needs an MO that defines 'progress', that usually involves progess in space, but could be changing a world or AI state. What motivation is driving them ever forward, survival, a job, escape, glory, etc?
I agree BUT I think it's limited to only certain types of games i.e. games with story. Look at FarmVill, there really isn't any MO. You could argue "making big farm!" is an MO but at that point the whole idea of an MO becomes trivial and just be applied to any menial task.
Quote Posted by Thirith
Are shooters as predominant in Japanese gaming? I don't know the scene well enough to be able to tell.
That's a good point, and I'd go to say guns are much less prevelant in Japanese games. They're more into... tentacles and stuff ;p
Jason Moyer on 10/11/2015 at 02:41
I wonder how much D&D's influence has meant to the over-use of violence in games, since that was basically a fantasy add-on to a wargame.
Pyrian on 10/11/2015 at 02:46
Forget D&D, what about chess and checkers!?
Chade on 10/11/2015 at 04:51
If your opponents must be recognisably human, you want game-play with a bit of complexity to it (e.g. not just traversing a thinly disguised graph), you don't know how to do emotional or intellectual interaction, that leave physical interaction.
So you're left with sports, violence, and stealth. All reasonably popular genres.
Sulphur on 10/11/2015 at 04:54
That doesn't quite explain the dearth of intellectual complexity in current-day multiplayer games, or the lack thereof of games that leverage the opponents' personalities. DayZ may be the one that actually started doing something with that, though.
Starker on 10/11/2015 at 09:17
Quote Posted by Chade
So you're left with sports, violence, and stealth. All reasonably popular genres.
I don't really know if I'd put stealth at the same level of popularity with sports and violence. Stealth-oriented titles typically don't sell tens of millions of copies, with the possible exception of Metal Gear. Even something like Hitman only sold 8 million over 5 games: (
http://www.hd.square-enix.com/eng/group/index.html#game6)
