h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"It was so poorly written and politically dodgy that I would've hurled it aside if I wasn't reading it on Kindle."

Even the bit when for no reason there are people in space watching zombies hunt rabbits in the desert?

No soul, Ed. No soul...

I quite enjoyed World War Z...

On topic: I'm bad at games, but love playing them. I take no shame that sometimes I have to use cheats to get further... for me it's just a helping hand to get to the next part of the story.

I've never got around to computer games, and doubt I ever will. I spend enough of my life in front of a screen. (I don't watch TV either.)

TRiG.

I have played '4 Minutes And 33 Seconds of Uniqueness' once. And I've won, too

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89198-4-Minutes-And-33-Seconds-Of-Uniqueness

"The object in 4 Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness is simple: You have to be the only person in the world playing it. Nothing actually happens; there are no scores or levels or game mechanics of any kind. You simply run the game, and it searches the internet for any other copies that are running. If any are found, both copies shut down and both players lose. If you make it four minutes and 33 seconds without anyone else on the internet starting the game - that is, if you're truly and completely unique in the world - you win."

Is there a heritage of computer games at all?

Books have been around for 100s of years..and obviously mass produced when the printing press arrived...and go back further to Greek poets and playwrights...for the western tradition.

A lot of TV drama here comes from the theatrical tradition, film too really.

I was trying to link with what Dogster was saying earlier.

When something has settled into the culture and proved it has staying power it gets more part of everyone's experience culturally...even if they don't partake..they'll probably be indirectly influenced.

We're *all* used to book tv and film references in the everyday.

The earliest computer game was an adaptation of Noughts & Crosses in 1952, and they've been part of popular culture for the best part of 30 years... if there isn't already a 'heritage' to computer games, we're not far from having one.

As others have said there's such a variety of games I'd be genuinely surprised if there was nothing that suited you. If controllers are the issue we've reached the point with the Xbox Kinect where you don't need a controller at all. Games like Civ or Command and Conquer just need a keyboard and mouse which presumably you can use.

There are games out there that meet every reasonable definition of art: Skyrim is one of them, Portal is another. One of the most friendship-affirming things I did last year was play through the co-op version of Portal 2 with my best mate. Over a couple of days we worked together through some challenges that were truly challenging and enjoyed a beautifully-written, beautifully acted story which was all the richer given what we'd had to do to see it.

It's all about knowing what you like: shooters generally bore me to tears, sports simulators do nothing for me but I love RPG games and real-time strategy games. Civ is great for counter-factual histories. You just need to find what works for you.

I play Hearts. Does that count?

I had some thoughts on Computer Games, in which I speculated
on their impact upon our lives. I postulate that they desensitise
our ability to distinguish realities because the feelings they
generate are actual and real emotional responses. We are not
pre-wired to make any distinction between emotional responses
based on whether the stimulation is real or imaginary.

It appeared in :
A80449680


~jwf~

I'm not sure that's any different from a book, a play or a film provoking an emotional response though...

While I might not have experience of games, everything I've heard about tem suggests that Squiggles' assertions are pish.

(Actually...that sentence probably only needed the last four words. )

I think it is. When you enter a book, play or film...you do so almost metaphorically. You identitify with different characters at different times. You as a person kind of disappear.

My understanding of computer games is that it is 'literal' you are you...you don't get lost in the labyrhinth...you keep that piece of thread always in your hand.

And then afterwards when you come back to yourself you can consciously reflect on what you got lost in...that's the bit I love as well. Analysing books and plays afterwards.

That's just how it is for me anyway.

There's definitely a heritage (did you know there are computer game museums dedicated to keeping old hardware going to preserve that heritage?), and it's actually really quite interesting to analyse the way modern games are defined by the choices the early designers made (and why those early designers made those choices).

The first generation to have properly grown up with computer games are just a little older than I am, in their mid to late 30s now. I think that's why we're only seeing now that the idea of computer games as normal and acceptable for adults seeping into the mainstream. In another 10-15 years, it'll only be people aged 50+ that didn't grow up with computer games. I think things will look quite different then.

> Squiggles' assertions are pish.<

Oh dear...but I'm sure some footie is probably on the radio.

"Is there a heritage of computer games at all?"

Of course.

Good modern games owe a great deal to what has come before, in exactly the same way the good films owe a lot to the history of cinema and books owe things to the history of literature.

There's a visual grammar to cinema. Whether you realise it or not, you instinctively understand things like depth of focus and the implications of its use, framing, musical cues or the lack of them, the three-act structure, and many tropes. These tropes, this grammar (most of it) didn't exist 100 years ago. It has developed as the medium has grown.

Similarly, there's a grammar to computer games, a set of assumptions, tropes and understandings that players pick up by association and come to instinctively understand. It's something of a hurdle to overcome, but no more so than the hurdle of suspending your disbelief when you watch Star Wars or picturing Victorian London when you read Dickens or Conan Doyle.

A simple example of a common trope would be something like a power bar on a weapon. Going back to R-Type in the 1980s, and still in place on something as modern as the Halo series, all players instinctively understand a weapon that can rapidly fire weak shots when you repeatedly press and release the fire button, but which if you HOLD the fire button will stop firing, charge up for a second or two, then when you release the button will fire a single massively destructive pulse. The same mechanic can be applied in a platform game for the height to which the player character can jump.

"Is there a heritage of computer games at all?"

Absolutely there is. Retro gaming is pretty popular in ways that I don't think many would have predicted. You'd have thought that people would move on to bigger and better and shinier, but there's significant interest in retro gaming, and often old games for old systems are made playable again on modern computers through emulators etc.

There's also a sense of lineage and origin in many game 'franchises'. Final Fantasy, Civilisation, Championship Manager, FIFA 20xx, Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls, Super Mario etc can all trace pretty direct ancestry through earlier games on earlier systems.

It's very, very rare for a computer game to have you literally being you. In most of them, even in the first person games, you're playing a character who has their own appearance, attitudes and background. Yes, there are games where you create a character and some do make characters loosely based on themselves (or at least an idealised representation of themselves) but the people who then truly find the line between themselves and the character blurring are very much in a minority, and the number those for whom that distinction becomes truly difficult to make is vanishingly small. The same things were being said about roleplaying games in the 1980s (I'm an RPG too by the way )

Novels were once thought to turn a young lady's mind, films to sap the nation of moral fibre...and we all know what TV does to you!

Theatre was once probably considered an irredeemable corruptor of peoples' minds.

I recently got embroiled in an argument about how eBooks and eReaders are cheapening literature and the experience of reading. I pointed out that people probably said the same thing when movable type was invented, and when books started becoming used more than scrolls.

I don't play computer games either, I just don't have the time. I'm sure I'll try one eventually, though.