VIDEO GAMES QUOTES III

quotations about video games

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The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage.... Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN

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In retrospect, it's easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run. An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

IAN BOGOST

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The old adage that "the journey is more important than the destination" is as true in gaming as it is in the real world. Pushing players to make their own way, without giving them tools that explain exactly where to go and how to get there, makes room for organic, emergent gameplay moments. These moments; The feeling of satisfaction when you point to a mountain in Breath of the Wild, then find and climb it; That adrenaline-fueled dash to safety in the Baker house; these are the kinds of experiences that so many players look for from video games, but so few games actually provide: The experience of escaping to somewhere new.

JON MARTINDALE

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I think good game writing is a process of getting out of the player's way. You give him or her just enough to work with narratively, but ultimately you let the player tell his or her own story.

TOM BISSELL

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A book or movie can show us what it is like to be in a character's shoes, but it is the video game that can put us into those shoes.

ROBERT B. MARKS

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A lot of young, non-college educated men are living in their parents' basement playing video games all day. But why? For starters, the study points to video games getting more and more sophisticated as time goes on. Gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry filled with beautiful, engaging games that can take upwards of 100 hours to complete. It's much easier to get lost in an immersive, virtual world than it used to be.

PATRICK ALLAN

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Now that I've worked on a few games, I've grappled with the degree to which games are not really a writer's medium. Film's not really a writer's medium, either. Good writing certainly doesn't hurt, but it's not the thing that saves the day.... Games are primarily about a connection between the player, the game world, and the central mechanic of the game. They're about creating a space for the player to engage with that mechanic and have the world react in a way that feels interesting and absorbing but also creates a sense of agency.

TOM BISSELL

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Over the last 20 years, as the medium exploded in popularity, there have been regular scare stories about zombie-like teenagers slumped in front of their PCs, eschewing school work and social interaction. In South Korea, where online gaming is effectively a national sport and its pro players are treated like rock stars, the government has funded treatment centres for games addiction and passed laws to limit access to games for children. But the parameters and definitions of addiction put forward in articles on the subject are often hazy and inexact, and contributing factors are ignored. The science around compulsive play is still in its infancy. Right now, the thinking works like this: do you spend a lot of time thinking about online games? Have they replaced previous hobbies? Do you ever play them to improve a bad mood? If so, you might one day qualify for a diagnosis of internet gaming disorder.

JORDAN ERICA WEBBER

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There have actually been interesting studies that 62 percent of executives at work play games online and they do it to feel more productive. That's because when you're trying to do real-world work it's frustrating; we don't see the results of our actions right away. So games give us that sense of blissful productivity.... Neurochemically we're kind of fired up ... to take on challenges.... Games take us immediately out of a state of paralysis or alienation or depression and they switch on the positive ways of thinking. They trigger the brain to a state in which it's possible to do good work.

JANE MCGONIGAL

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Boys who never play video games are extremely unusual. Since game play is often a social activity for boys, this could be a marker of social problems that bear looking into.

LAWRENCE KUTNER & CHERYL OLSON

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In the modern era, the capacity of mainstream games to tell more complex, emotional stories has grown enormously. The arrival of high-definition visuals, the development of intensely accurate facial motion capture, and the recruitment of Triple A acting and writing talent has led to the creation of characters who are recognisable, relatable and intrinsically human. And when you have characters and environments that the player can understand and recognise as authentic, the need for vast heroic narratives is lessened.... Games aren't going to drop violence for romance or reasoning. But maybe we'll get more games in which the motivations are intricate and human, where the motivating factor isn't an evil sorcerer or the imminent heat death of the universe.

KEITH STUART

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She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel.

JONATHAN MAYBERRY

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Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon ...

TERRY PRATCHETT

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There are types of narrative that video games are not as adept at telling as a medium such as film or literature -- narratives that benefit from having the author maintain direct control over the story at all times (an impossibility in a video game, where the player has active agency). And, there are a number of major video game releases where the fact that they were trying to too hard to be movies, or relying too heavily on cutscenes, is a valid criticism. But this is far from an absolute, particularly in a medium that, particularly through the indie scene, is growing and developing storytelling tools in leaps and bounds.

ROBERT B. MARKS

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Video games are always half real.

JESPER JUUL

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If game playing leads to isolation or to integration into gaming communities with antisocial norms, one might expect less civic engagement or connection. On the other hand, to the extent that games are played with others or integrate youth into vibrant communities where healthy group norms are practiced and where teenagers' social networks can develop, games might well develop social capital.

JOSEPH KAHNE

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For a very long time, a huge percentage of action-adventure games were about saving the planet -- sometimes even the entire universe -- from some monstrous invading evil. The stakes were almost always that high. There were many intermingled reasons for this. Partly, there's the huge influence that fantasy and science-fiction masterworks have had on game developers -- the overbearing presence of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars in the collective imaginative canon. But also, a lot of early video games drew their story-telling approach directly from mythic sources -- the great legends, folk and fairy tales -- because with limited visual and narrative story-telling tools available, these primal tales were the easiest to communicate.

KEITH STUART

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Just because several mass murderers liked violent games doesn't mean the games themselves caused the men to become violent. Isn't it more reasonable to conclude that mentally unstable men with the potential to kill would be more attracted to violent video games than the games brainwashed everyday dudes into becoming heartless killers? If a seemingly normal person went from playing a gory shooting game to killing people in real life without so much as batting an eye, I'm willing to wager mental illness played a much bigger role than harmless digital entertainment.

JAKE MAGEE

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You just watch. There is going to be a Columbine-times-10 incident, and everyone will finally get it. Either that, or some video gamer is going to go Columbine at some video game exec's expense or at E3, and then the industry will begin to realize that there is no place to hide, that it has trained a nation of Manchurian Children.

JACK THOMPSON

Tags: Jack Thompson

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The only readily quantifiable benefit to video games seems to be that they're fun.

JORDAN ERICA WEBBER

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