Trying not to be judgmental or snarky, I truly just don’t get it. Video games for me peaked with Tetris and Super Mario World, and were about killing time, hand-eye coordination, and developing certain reflexes. Apparently, though, the point of video games now is to … honestly, I’m not trying to be an asshole … do everything one would normally do in real life (or could do if it weren’t for those pesky laws about murder and mayhem), just do it while tied to a computer.
So, please, educate me.
Well, isn’t Secondlife just a wish fulfillment game? It’s a chance to play around with your life and the choices you’ve made in the course of it. And WoW is not about doing whatever one would do in real life. At least not my life. How often do you run into Orc raiding parties while popping down to the corner store?
:dubious:
Hey, I’m going by things I hear like “Orc raiding parties” … if I’m wrong, and there’s not violence being done in these games, then tell me.
I may have misread your post. In fact, I think I probably have. You’re not really suggesting gamers would go on mass murder sprees in real life if they only could, right?
Only by way of exaggeration, Bosstone. Sorry.
Just wanted to be sure. God knows there’s enough loonies out there that do think that.
As for the bulk of your question, you seem to be referring to online games primarily. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, EVE Online, City of Heroes, etc. are mostly about careers and doing what seems like work, and yeah, to some people it probably is. That’s why there’s also games like Katamari Damacy, Team Fortress 2, Peggle (one of the most insidious casual games I’ve ever played), and countless other games that are nothing like real-life simulations.
The point is more about the community than the game itself, honestly. I love EVE Online to death, but my friends stopped playing it and so did I, because without my friends there’s just not much fun in it. Right now I’m heavily invested in City of Heroes, which is a flawed game in many, many ways, the least of which is that 90% of my time in game is spent pressing a few buttons over and over to beat up an endless stream of enemies. If the game were just that, it’d be boring as sin. But I’m involved with a large community of pretty savvy people, and it’s talking to them, doing things with them, that makes the game fun. (And some people do in fact enjoy doing tedious things over and over again; I found this essay today while responding to another thread.)
This is more apparent in Second Life. I’ve never tried it myself, but it’s not even really a game. There’s no real objectives, no combat system or anything like that. (Anyone who knows more can correct me if I’m wrong.) It’s really just one enormous graphical chat room where people can get together and do things unencumbered by geographical limitations. So are the other online games; it’s just that WoW and CoH provide things for you to do, whereas with Second Life you’ve got to come up with your own entertainment.
First, thank you. You’ve brought a lot of stuff up that starts to open doors for me, and I appreciate that. I’ve highlighted below the main one I wish to know more about for now. (And forgive me for my ignorance on this, but, hey, that’s why we’re all here, right?) You say in part
Which I take to mean not that you hang out in a big room actually in the presence of the people and literally talking to them and doing things with them, but that this community, talking, and doing, is in the virtual space of the game or some parallel space (IM, chat, etc.)? So, if you’ll excuse what I’m sure is a massive over-simplification, it’s a hobby that you engage in with other people which gives you the vehicle by which to carry out friendships?
[Why do I suddenly feel like Cmdr. Data?]
For me, the combat/button-mashing (and having my character look fabulous while doing it) is the point of City of Heroes. All the extraneous stuff like crafting, auctioning, etc., is boring as hell and I can’t be bothered with it.
Yeah, exactly. It’s like the SDMB, at least in its early incarnation: a group of people liked Cecil’s columns, so they got together to talk about the columns on the message board. If someone finds working on Ford trucks fun, they can probably find a good online community that likes talking about trucks.
Now of course, I’m not going to say the game is irrelevant. Since I’m into City of Heroes right now, I’ll use that as an example. The framework is a game based on superheroes who run around the city stomping out crime. There’s enough plot in the game to give it some direction, but like I said, the action tends to be repetitive and would almost certainly get boring in a single-player game.
However, I’m involved with a group of people organized around intelligent roleplay in the game, with links to other groups. When I’m in the game, I have access to something like four chat channels with various people on them that work pretty much like IRC. Outside the game, there’s message boards for more permanent communication within the group and the coalition of groups. It doesn’t have to be discussion about the game, but usually is. The ‘physical’ in-game interaction, of teaming up with other players to complete a given objective, triples the potential entertainment I could get out of playing the game alone.
Now, I’m not going to dump on the games themselves. There’s usually plenty of stuff to do and sights to see (the landscapes in some MMOs are among the most beautiful I’ve seen, and some of them are just not reproduceable on Earth). But the real appeal of MMOs is community, IMO; if I wanted a single-player superhero game, Freedom Force is a better scripted, more interesting to play game that doesn’t dink around so much with repetitive tasks.
I think I’m rambling quite a bit, but that’s mostly my view on why they’re fun. It’s another aspect of the current trend of online interaction; some people just use a game for it, while others prefer message boards or instant messaging.
It’s an alternate life in a way. You can log in whenever you want and have adventures and explore a strange and interesting world. Your character gets more stuff and becomes more powerful, you can make in-game alliances and friendships, many of those friendships start off with real-life friends or become real-life friends.
I mostly like exploring, but off-line games like Oblivion have satisfied that desire.
Think of those things you have or want to get that make your life more buttkicking. Like a custom paint job for your car, snazzy clothes, powerful stereo speakers, remotes, multifunctional cell phones, huge widescreen flat panel HDTV, etc.
Now imagine that instead of buying those things, you get them by legally killing people and taking them. That’s the appeal.
On the Onion’s AV Page - link here - they describe those on-line sites thusly:
Pretty much. Hey, how else do you expect us geeks to find husbands?
And yet the people I hang out with on CoH are all coupled up. 
Dang kids these days! Back in my day, geeks used to have to go to conventions to find spouses! :mad: 
It allows people to interact with and make friends with people all over the world instead of just the folks in your neighborhood…and then kill them electronically in many fun and profitable ways.
This is one of those things that people either get (mostly because they play them) or they don’t (generally because they either never have tried one, or tried on and weren’t able to connect to anyone and so left immediately thinking the whole thing is nuts or boring…or both). It’s like computer games in general. I’ve had people ask me why I play computer or even console games…isn’t it just a waste of time? Isn’t it boring? Aren’t there better things to do (usually after urging me to watch Survivor or American Idol or some such non-sense).
You get it…or you don’t.
Just my two cents worth (I’ve played WoW, DaoC, Everquest, UO and a couple more MMO’s and am currently playing TR while waiting in hopeful anticipation for my inclusion in the WAR beta).
-XT
p.s. You have to BE a playah to BEAT the playah…
I never really understood the appeal of video games at all until a few years ago, when my parents got me a PS2 on a whim. I started playing RPGs, and I really liked games with a fantasy plot I had to work for, but there were almost none of them that my husband could play together. We looked all over, and found nothing, and then decided to try out World of Warcraft. It combined the very best aspects of the RPGs I’d played (engrossing world, extensive plot, TONS of playtime) with the added bonus of adding other real players as an extra unknown. It lets me interact with types of people I would NEVER encounter on a normal basis (soldiers, teenagers, people in different countries), and the game itself is sufficiently complex to keep me entertained for a long time (I get really bored watching TV and most movies).
Bottom line: I like the storyline, like the people and I also really enjoy the complexities of mastering a game where all the characters you can play have tons of abilities rather than only a few. Also, playing against and with other people adds an extra element of competition and teamwork.
Does that help?
/edit: I don’t think I’d have stuck with WoW if I had started playing it by myself rather than with my husband. The group play elements are what make the game really shine, in my opinion, and I probably would’ve gotten bored before discovering them if I hadn’t started the game teaming up with him from level one onward.
Well… EVE Online isn’t about doing anything I could do in real life. Nobody will give me a space borne battleship
It’s about running a deep, strategically rich game which has a persistent universe, no sharding, excellent gameplay mechanics, a cool story, and some pretty neat graphics. It’s like chess, but with lasers. It’s a way I can meet up with people from all over the globe, discuss strategy and tactics, and go have a spaceship battle with another 150 folks.
It’s also about being able to do that for free, as EVE is (to my knowledge) the only MMO where I can pay with in-game virtual currency to keep my subscription running.
Which isn’t to say that single player games don’t have their own appeal. It’s fun to boot up Medieval Total War II: Kingdoms every now and again, just like it’s fun to organize a gank fleet and go raiding enemy territory in EVE.
And, saaaaaaaay, Bosstone, what sort of SP’s does your old EVE-O character have, and what were they spec’d in? You looking, by any chance, to get rid of it?
The appeal of video games to me is mostly about feeling accomplished for “beating” them. I’m not using the word “beating” lightly, though. I mean beating the SHIT out of them. I played games like civilization 2 and final fantasy tactics until I could smash through the hardest possible challenges with absolutely no problem, doing things the developers of the game never could have possibly intended to be done.
When WoW came out, it was just like a bigger version of those games. I played WoW to “beat it” in ways that the developers could never have predicted or intended. In the early part of the game’s history, it was very possible to see further than the developers, to maximize some aspect of your character that the developers never really considered and crush the mechanics of the game that prevented you from getting “too” strong. A good example for abusive things my class (hunter) used to be able to do was to split groups of monsters that you were supposed to fight together, turning them into two (or more) different separate more easily managed battles. At one point you could also abuse the game mechanics to get a pet with higher armor than the best possible armor a Warrior could get. Some low level pets had inherent abilities that made them much, much better than pets are supposed to be (like having natural resistances to every type of magic, or dealing shadow damage instead of normal damage that gets reduced by armor), so if you trained those pets up from a low level you had a pet significantly stronger than the developers intended.
Over time, though, the developers found and beat almost every abusive thing hunters could do. Bosses that you used to be able to “kite” and kill without even being hit will now reset back to their original positions with full health if you try to kite them. Monsters are now impossible to split from most groups. All pets were standardized to one baseline, making the uberpet a thing of the past. That’s when I stopped playing the game, because there was nothing really fun left to find and break.
By the way, does anyone remember the last big awesome thing a hunter accomplished? Plenty of us could solo Scholomance or Baron at level 60 with no problem, but before the mend pet mechanics changed a hunter was actually able to solo Azuregos. It took him several hours if IIRC. That guy was freaking incredible.