People who play videogames aren't escaping reality, they're simulating having meaningful participation in a society. If anything, gamers crave reality. An example of escaping reality is wearing noise cancelling headphones on the train so no one talks to you. Gamers are trying to simulate a reality where the work they do has tangible meaning. You do this dungeon and you get a new item, which you can use to do new dungeons. In reality, you do a job, and you get a paycheck, which you can only use to continue doing that same job. There are obviously meaningful jobs out there, but many, many people are being denied them, relegated to alienated labor. They are being denied access to community, relegating them to lonliness. The labor in videogames isn't alienating since it's meant to achieve a purpose and meant to advance you and grow your character. Jobs and a lot of what "society" these days has to offer just.... don't do that. It's all about PARTICIPATION.
absolutely, there's a big part of it that is enjoying the fruits of unalienated labor
undoubtedly playing video games offer some simulacrum of realization in lieu of actual real life accomplishments which have been deprived due to labor alienation, but i don't see myself as a meaningful member of society if i'm playing, say, cruelty squad.
OP is referring to simulation of having meaningful participation, i.e. meaningful only in the context of the "society" that exists within the simulation, i.e. your in-game actions are able to effect change within the game world (and that this is attractive as a substitute for your inability to do so in the real world)
you're not a meaningful participant in cruelty squad? pardon me but I have a wall full of chunkopops and feet full of gunkboosters, my life is going great
but i don't see myself as a meaningful member of society if i'm playing, say, cruelty squad
Arguably the ultimate goal of Cruelty Squad is to
spoiler
escape society and the warped version of life itself in the setting.
I'd definitely say this is true of some games, especially a certain type of MMO player, but there are some games that are fun for the feeling of mastery they can offer, rather than their unalienated labor. In fact I got pretty tired of how often games started to offer "progression" as their main draw instead of offering deep or tightly designed mechanics. It got me into boomer shooters, as they exist as an almost antiquated sort of game that relies on a simple set of static tools that are brought to life through craft like level design and encounter design.
Of course the growing popularity of "work" games that prioritize long term accumulation goals like survival games and mmos are definitely the result of labor alienation, though.
You're right, those shooters are very tight and specific on how they operate. Move, aim, shoot as the main tools you have. I actually like the boomer shooters because they still have level designs that don't necessarily represent anything. Purely abstract levels that only gesture towards being a Mars base or a Nazi bunker. They weren't always able to create levels that looked like something that makes sense in reality, so they often didn't even try. Nonsense hallways, rooms that only exist to hold a powerup, the whole monster closets. It's neat from a design perspective that the areas in your video game can exist to only serve the game itself and its mechanics rather than be a sensible representation of Earth.
Does Painkiller count as a boomer shooter? That one's my favorite.
Painkiller is a boomer shooter but it's kind of a weird Serious Sam-style "lol just throw a hundred of em at the player" one. Fun game but compared to some of the genre revivals like Dusk, it came off as a little slapdash to me.
Dusk is exactly what you describe when it comes to level design, the first few levels are fine but later on they get really interpretive and creative, real masters of that very specific craft firing on all cylinders.
you can have a house in animal crossing too. Look at you, bigshot.
Maybe not something advertised as a game? In junior high I took a class on house construction and for part of it we used some piece of software to design a house and you could put furniture into the rooms and walk around and see look at them and stuff. That was a long ass time ago and I don't remember the name of it, but I bet something like that exists now with probably way better graphics and more features than existed back then.
in the 90s and 2000s there was a huge flourishing of dozens of different simplified CAD programs for people to design dream homes with, like My House, 3D Home Architect, Design & Build, Visio Home, Floorplan 3D, or Autodesk Home. The subprime mortgage collapse kind of killed that whole industry. A lot of them were by major publishers that just stopped making that type of software, and others were pretty niche and if they survived, it was because they'd already pivoted towards other software. Today, that entire industry is just a handful of people selling virtually the same old ass sketchy software from 2002 that's been barely updated to just not instantly crash on modern windows.
The one standout that's actually still being developed and is usable is SketchUp, which only exists because someone bought it before Google could kill it.
I mean the main hallmark of that industry was that most of the software in the 2000s was absolutely awful to use, costed $600, or both awful and costed $600. In the 90s, a lot of it was basically just Doom Hammer Editor but for boomers. And all of it seemingly had low spec requirements but inexplicably ran like dogshit on every computer. Basically, they needed to be properly 3d accelerated but often didn't have support for 3d cards because they were targeted at people still using an OG pentium in 2001. There were a few standouts, but once SketchUp went free in 2007, it just swept up by being infinitely better than every other option and free, and stole what little remained of the market after the housing market popped.
I'll be honest, I don't know enough about computers to know what most of that means 😅 😅
Basically most of it was bad. The reason it was usually bad was because 3d modeling software needs to have a real graphics card like you'd use for gaming or professional cad work. But this software was destined to be sold to mostly old people using a terrible, 10 year old computer that they're afraid of, so they only rarely use it. So, rather than putting in the more complicated effort to make the software work with different graphics cards, they just would ignore that because the computers it would be used with would be so shitty that they weren't likely to have one anyway.
These days even a basic computer has an onboard graphics card built into the processor, so that's less of an issue, but in the 90s, plenty of software and even games used a software renderer instead of a 3d accelerated renderer. Lego Island is an example of this.
The Sims 4 actually has a dedicated first person POV toggle. And the house designing features are the best in the series (loss of create-a-style aside...)
I don’t believe there’s anyway to put it in first person and properly experience the house you build. I always remember being frustrated by the walls disappearing to enable the iso view because it made decorating feel pointless
Me playing grand strategy games just so I can feel like I have a bit of control over the conditions of my life and the world around me:
Oh do I know that feeling, especially when I play as socialist factions and try imagining the good guys winning for once.
The Playstation Dreamworld argues that games, unlike other mediums, let you forget you are experiencing the artwork. Immersion is about forgetting you are playing, like how you forget you are in a dream. Games in particular, because they are more conscious, resemble Lucid Dreams; you know you are playing, but are immersed anyway. Interactivity is unique to games, allowing dream analysis interpretations of both player and game.
They targeted gamers. Gamers. We're a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. Over, and over, and over all for nothing more than a little digital token saying we did. We'll punish our selfs doing things others would consider torture, because we think it's fun. We'll spend most if not all of our free time min maxing the stats of a fictional character all to draw out a single extra point of damage per second. Many of us have made careers out of doing just these things: slogging through the grind, all day, the same quests over and over, hundreds of times to the point where we know evety little detail such that some have attained such gamer nirvana that they can literally play these games blindfolded. Do these people have any idea how many controllers have been smashed, systems over heated, disks and carts destroyed 8n frustration? All to latter be referred to as bragging rights? These people honestly think this is a battle they can win? They take our media? We're already building a new one without them. They take our devs? Gamers aren't shy about throwing their money else where, or even making the games our selves. They think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We've been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. They picked a fight against a group that's already grown desensitized to their strategies and methods. Who enjoy the battle of attrition they've threatened us with. Who take it as a challange when they tell us we no longer matter. Our obsession with proving we can after being told we can't is so deeply ingrained from years of dealing with big brothers/sisters and friends laughing at how pathetic we used to be that proving you people wrong has become a very real need; a honed reflex. Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature. We love a challange. The worst thing you did in all of this was to challange us. You're not special, you're not original, you're not the first; this is just another boss fight.
The foundation of anti-gaming criticism is: Man makes games, games do not make man. Gaming is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce games, which are an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Gaming is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its virtual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against gaming is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is gaming.
Gamer suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Gaming is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the Oxy of the people.
The abolition of gaming as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of gaming is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which gaming is the halo.
How did I manage to read that entire first paragraph without realising
Yeah. I didn't know this tske was hot, but escapism despite being what people claim to want from fiction isn't what people want. People don't want escapism they want to escape. The idea that fiction can serve as an escape into a better world instead of inspiration towards a better one is a whole thing.
it's that whole tolkien quote about how if someone wants to escape a place, the only people angry about it are jailors and the guards.
I think most of the NFT "Metaverse" push was the desire for so many bazingas to be landlords and rent-seekers in the one place they could reach: magical internet real estate.
I think there's some landlord/gentry stuff, but for many it's the American myth of the self sufficient Yeoman farmer. See the popularity of survival games with base building, or mars/sea homesteading.
Many of these Bazinga/soft chud people just want, ironically, a safe space that is theirs and that they can build lasting things on, but they're so brainwormed and alienated that the thought that might be possible socially rather than as an individual is utterly alien to them
Many of these Bazinga/soft chud people just want, ironically, a safe space that is theirs and that they can build lasting things on
The most bazinga/chud of them also want to be able to destroy other people's similar virtual property, too.
People who play videogames aren't escaping reality, they're simulating having meaningful participation in a society. If anything, gamers crave reality. An example of escaping reality is wearing noise cancelling headphones on the train so no one talks to you. Gamers are trying to simulate a reality where the work they do has tangible meaning. You do this dungeon and you get a new item, which you can use to do new dungeons. In reality, you do a job, and you get a paycheck, which you can only use to continue doing that same job. There are obviously meaningful jobs out there, but many, many people are being denied them, relegated to alienated labor. They are being denied access to community, relegating them to lonliness. The labor in videogames isn't alienating since it's meant to achieve a purpose and meant to advance you and grow your character. Jobs and a lot of what "society" these days has to offer just.... don't do that. It's all about PARTICIPATION.
All of that rings true with the contemporary version of the "isekai" genre (the genre isn't inherently bad; arguably The Neverending Story is just an older isekai story), where the fantasy world isn't really the draw, but the capitalist exploitation of it is, up to and including subjugation of "NPCs."
