VIDEO GAMES QUOTES III

quotations about video games

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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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Video games keep getting more complex and visually appealing, so it's no wonder more people are drawn to them nowadays. But this new era of compelling digital entertainment could have a dark side for unemployed young men. It might sound like something an old man shouts from his rocking chair, but kids these days appear to be more interested in escapism than diving into the job market. A preliminary report from economists at Princeton, the University of Rochester and the University of Chicago, suggests a strong link between electronic leisure activities and unemployment rates for men in their 20s.

PATRICK ALLAN

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Video games are better without stories. Film, television, and literature all tell them better. So why are games still obsessed with narrative?

IAN BOGOST

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Many games, such as Minecraft, are better described as electronic places to visit than traditional video games, but in the process of interacting with them, we create experiences, which in turn become our narratives and stories.

ROBERT B. MARKS

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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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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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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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Video games are part of a trend in cultural history that started 20,000 years ago, as the number and types of symbolic codes external to the individual mind went from none to few to many. In a world in which devices for external memory storage have become increasingly important, video games socialize the minds of players to deal with the symbolic systems of the computer, society's latest form of external memory storage.

BARRIE GUNTER

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There is some question about the degree to which a player really has important choices in games. Video games are designed so that there are elements of choice in them but that is not the same thing as free choice or absolute choice, in which characters can do anything they want to do. There is a set of choices that are open to players at every moment, but these choices, and all choices in video games, are predetermined by the game designers. It is the parser and the design of the video game that determines what we are capable of doing when we play these games! This is an important matter to keep in mind because it qualifies the notion that video games are interactive or limits our notion of what interactivity is all about.

ARTHUR ASA BERGER

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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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Video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport.

ROB PARDO

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Video games are nonlinear. In almost all cases, you don't simply start at the beginning and proceed along a predefined path to a conclusion. Like chess or Monopoly, different players have different experiences.

LAWRENCE KUTNER & CHERYL OLSON

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I used to think that games were a great storytelling medium, potentially, and that idiot writers were fucking it up. I don't believe that any more. I now believe that whatever the purpose of this medium is, it's not quite to tell stories. What were the first games? Space Invaders, Pac-Man. These were goal-oriented activities that had a vague overlay of story. So now we fast-forward thirty years, and games are primarily story-like experiences organized around the successful achievement of goals. And so the balance has flipped. The storytelling game and the purer, more traditional type of video game are, I think, on a path of divergence right now: whatever is happening in video games is going to split these two kinds of games off from each other, and so storytelling games are, eventually, going to become their own thing.

TOM BISSELL

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Basically, video games are a fun way to pass the time and feel good about yourself when you have too much free time forced into your life.

PATRICK ALLAN

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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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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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Video games are always half real.

JESPER JUUL

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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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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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