VIDEO GAMES QUOTES III

quotations about video games

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Video games are no substitute for real world pleasures (marriage, the birth of a child, spiritual enlightenment, what have you), but they do provide a nice reprieve from real world woes.

BRETT WEISS
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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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Psychos will always be psychos; they don't need video games to help them.

SCOTT RAMSOOMAIR

Tags: Scott Ramsoomair

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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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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 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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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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As animation develops and video games approach films in the quality of their images, it seems likely that video games will evolve into a new kind of adventure film in which game players become the lead actors and actresses.

ARTHUR ASA BERGER

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Communication is one of the biggest challenges of video game design. How much information do players need before they go where you want them to go? Looking back, the games we think of as "retro" were often vague in telegraphing what players should do. In the modern era, the pendulum has swung the other way, and now many developers seem to err on the side of caution, guiding players through even large, open-ended experiences. But it doesn't have to be that way. While it is important to make sure gamers can find out what to do and where to go at any given moment, those mechanics increasingly come at the expense of discovery, diluting some of the greatest joys to be found in exploring virtual worlds.

JON MARTINDALE

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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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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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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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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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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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Video games are well positioned to be a spectator sport.

ROB PARDO

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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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