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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 06 2017, @04:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the in-it-for-the-game dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by riT-k0MA on Monday March 06 2017, @09:34AM (1 child)

    by riT-k0MA (88) on Monday March 06 2017, @09:34AM (#475547)

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:01PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday March 07 2017, @02:01PM (#476004) Journal

    Ok, in most games you decide the story, but you still don't get the character's thoughts and feelings most of the time.

    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.