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A very interesting piece of long form journalism cum memoir about the way video gaming has subsumed and changed the way we live, interact, and think.
To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November's presidential election. And they play them a lot: According to a variety of recent studies, more than 40 percent of Americans play at least three hours a week, 34 million play on average 22 hours each week, 5 million hit 40 hours, and the average young American will now spend as many hours (roughly 10,000) playing by the time he or she turns 21 as that person spent in middle- and high-school classrooms combined. Which means that a niche activity confined a few decades ago to preadolescents and adolescents has become, increasingly, a cultural juggernaut for all races, genders, and ages. How had video games, over that time, ascended within American and world culture to a scale rivaling sports, film, and television? Like those other entertainments, video games offered an escape, of course. But what kind?
In 1993, the psychologist Peter D. Kramer published Listening to Prozac, asking what we could learn from the sudden mania for antidepressants in America. A few months before the election, an acquaintance had put the same question to me about video games: What do they give gamers that the real world doesn't?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday March 06 2017, @05:08AM (14 children)
Books? You mean static blobs of string information that are devoid of interaction and immersion? Wow, log in already. Unnamed sources have informed me that Roko's basilisk will punish you for not supporting the superior medium: virtual reality open world video gaming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 06 2017, @05:47AM (6 children)
"devoid of interaction and immersion?"
The level of immersion in a book is dependent on a few things. Your interest, your reading ability, and your imagination, for starters. Level of comprehension of the reading material is important as well. I've spent weeks immersed in Middle Earth, long before anyone thought they were up to the challenge of making films, videos, movies, or whatever they might be called. A person who cannot become immersed in reading is probably not taking reading seriously. That goes for people of all ages, whether they simply failed to learn to read 50 years ago, or they are ten years old today, and don't believe that reading is important anymore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 06 2017, @02:17PM (4 children)
And the Greywolf(?) series.
We've had book based interactive fiction since the 60s-70s and possibly much longer.
Given that and the fact that higher level code doesn't look much different than it, given simple inputs and outputs, and gaming has been going on in both genres for around 50 years now.
(Score: 2) by driven on Monday March 06 2017, @02:44PM (2 children)
When you say "interactive fiction" are you referring to the "choose your own adventure" type books? I used to love those as a kid but they are much too simple now. Is there anything similar out there at an adult reading level?
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:16PM (1 child)
I picked up one of those books in my teens from some book club or other; it was called 'Grailquest: The Castle of Darkness' and I must have read it a fifty times or more. There was a dry, absurd sense of humour running through it and although it seems there were 8 books in total, they were never easy to get hold of in my little one horse town in the eighties, nor did we have much in the way of disposable income (see Monty Python's "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch for extra notes on equivalent deprivation).
Details on that book series here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grailquest [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Wednesday March 08 2017, @03:27PM
Should have put the title through a search engine before posting: they're all available on archive.org in multiple formats. The distraction this provides from the bureaucratic hell that is the UK probate system is very welcome.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 06 2017, @03:06PM
I can't recall when I first stumbled over those sort of books. I guess that I was a young adult. The books seemed so simple, no real plot, the characters couldn't develop. I ran through the story, came back and took a different route, came back and did things differently, all within a short period of time - half an hour, maybe an hour. I watched for similar books for a little while, and they were all so simplistic, that I just quit looking for them. To make such a thing complex, you would need thousands of pages, not a mere hundred or so. An extremely complex story would require tens of thousands of pages. Pages in a book can probably be equated to lines in game code, if you try. That makes the book far to unweildy to tell a complex story with real characters. No one wants to drive to the library, just to load that one book in the trunk, and bring it home for two weeks.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday March 06 2017, @03:43PM
That doesn't change the fact that the set of video games is strictly a superset of the set of books, assuming visual novel style video games and discounting the physical paper as a part of the book experience (modern e-readers and e-books support this generalization).
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(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday March 06 2017, @07:30AM (1 child)
Books? You mean static blobs of string information that are devoid of interaction and immersion? Wow, log in already. Unnamed sources have informed me that Roko's basilisk will punish you for not supporting the superior medium: virtual reality open world video gaming.
You are false data. Therefore I shall ignore you. [youtube.com]
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by Webweasel on Monday March 06 2017, @10:42AM
Bomb #20: Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this.
Doolittle: [frantic] Why don't you have more time?
Bomb #20: Because I must explode in 75 seconds.
Still one of my favourite movies.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 2) by riT-k0MA on Monday March 06 2017, @09:34AM (1 child)
I read books.
Immersion? within a few seconds/minutes of reading a book, the words fade and all I see is a kind of a film or even a sort of memory. A film where one can (in most books) read the character's inner thoughts and feelings.
Compared to gaming (something else I do), gaming feels a lot more distant to a book. Ok, in most games you decide the story, but you still don't get the character's thoughts and feelings most of the time.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:01PM
What does that even mean, exactly? How would that work? In most games, "the character" is YOU. So you want the game to tell you what you should think and how you should feel? That's part of what can make a game more immersive -- with books you're stuck in someone else's head. Someone who may be nothing like you. Someone you may not understand. With a game, it's you. Reading a book while you're thinking "Man this guy is an idiot, why the hell would he do that? Why doesn't he do it this way?" can REALLY break that immersion. But playing a game and going "Hmm, this seems like a good idea---OH SHIT NO IT ISN'T!" doesn't. At least not until you die :) Not that there aren't benefits to getting the story through someone else's mind too, but immersion isn't necessarily one of them.
Although my girlfriend does have some game she loves where the main character has panic attacks and such, so sometimes games DO actually try to push the character's feelings through to the player as a game mechanic. She says it's realistic enough to even induce them in her occasionally. Don't recall what game that was though. It was for the PS1 or PS2 I think.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday March 06 2017, @01:12PM (2 children)
Very CLI vs GUI.
I've noticed CLI types tend to be well read and GUI types tend to be extremely stylish.
GUIs are very hard to learn for literate people, like trying to learn some weird made up kanji. Its none the less a lot easier for CLI people to learn a GUI than for completely illiterate people to learn a CLI. Illiterate people can't CLI whereas literate people are merely inefficient and annoyed by GUI.
Once you learn one CLI they're all the same or at least trivially learnable, much like literate people can switch from Tolkien to Ringo a lot quicker than someone illiterate can learn "see spot run". Decades ago like in the 80s this bred the concept of the "computer people" where young people would learn one CLI and therefore be pretty decent at all of them and this would really confuse old timers, and this meme still lives today even when teens are pretty much idiots at computer use just like have always been WRT sex drugs and music.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 06 2017, @03:04PM (1 child)
GUIs are very hard to learn for literate people, like trying to learn some weird made up kanji. Its none the less a lot easier for CLI people to learn a GUI than for completely illiterate people to learn a CLI. Illiterate people can't CLI whereas literate people are merely inefficient and annoyed by GUI.
I agree with you that there is often a different set of personalities for people who prefer CLI vs. GUI.
But I think this is a false dichotomy. A well-designed GUI can be very efficient and helpful for lots of tasks. A well-designed GUI can be easy to learn and use. As with everything, different tools are appropriate to different tasks. I almost always have both CLI and GUI open on my desktop, which I use for different things.
Once you learn one CLI they're all the same or at least trivially learnable
Huh. I guess you weren't around the folks I knew who grew up using DOS and complained continuously when they showed up to university or whatever and were suddenly forced to deal with a UNIX-derived system.
What I think you might be getting at here isn't so much about GUI vs. CLI as it is about documentation and discoverability. Modern poorly-constructed GUIs are often incredibly poorly documented and have all sorts of features that are only discoverable by trial-and-error, by having a friend show you, or by surfing the web for "15 top things you didn't know you could do with your iPhone!"
On the other hand, a traditional CLI (and even most traditional GUIs) has built-in documentation available with a clear command (like man or --help or whatever). And complete documentation has traditionally been available in an easily indexed form in books and now through websites. But admittedly it is a bit harder to make a CLI discoverable in the same way as a well-designed GUI, with its ability to nest, group, and organize commands. (Sure, you can list all commands available to you in a particular shell. But unless you're in a limited environment, that may not be so useful.)
To me, the difference you're talking about isn't between those who like CLI vs. GUI, but between those who are willing to RTFM vs. those who aren't. Literate people are willing to deal with documentation and actually prefer learning things that way. People who can't stand reading a book are more likely to click random buttons or swipe erratically until something happens that does what they want.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday March 06 2017, @03:39PM
I guess you weren't around the folks I knew who grew up using DOS and complained continuously when they showed up to university or whatever and were suddenly forced to deal with a UNIX-derived system.
On Acorn systems and anything CP/M derived, there was a command 'cat', short for 'catalogue' for listing the contents of a disk (later, of a directory). I still occasionally type 'cat' into a UNIX terminal and wonder why it's taking so long to list the contents of the directory...
sudo mod me up