Re: Shared vision (was: Re: (TFT) Hanging Magic in TFT.)

[Jay Carlisle <maou.tsaou@gmail.com>]

Well I thought You'd be up against it these days Sir and I'm sorry for
the tardy reply as I only just came across this in spam... Thought
You'd be Tennyson to New Horizons and didn't want Ulysses a bunch of
jibber-Jabbel when Your busy so I've actually refrained Myself from
bugging You more than once here recently so it's GREAT to "see" You
but I'll try to be concise even though this is technically game
philosophy which salts the glossing over My argument for precision
wound but petra to be stuck between a rock and a hard place than to
just take a powder without ever giving it a shot and who kno3's? I'm
swamped Myself at the moment so I'm gonna cut/paste a couple of few
keeps that are gonna fall over but ought to give Me foundations for
one that'll stand. I think You know My particular... ummm... uhhhhh...
Just don't leave and I'll tell You how I think I can address the
concerns You mention better than You might think by arguing We don't
have to kill everything in sight to have an entertaining game.

>From this morning;

So I'm reading this editorial about Lara Croft
http://www.gamesradar.com/think-you-know-lara-croft-dont-be-so-sure/
and it's talking about how"The 2013 Tomb Raider reboot had the
opportunity to redress Lara's approach to violence, but it didn't.".
It completely misses the big picture which is not to say it's not a
well written editorial or that I'm trying to critize the writers
opinion but rather that they seem to fail to have a full conception of
the game as a gestalt which is interesting as the author points out
Lara's first kill encounter contrasting it with a "subsequent 400
kills" tallied in gameplay evidencing a confusion of equivocation
between the narrative story and the actual gameplay which are very
separate entity's that can not function together in the way the writer
seems to wish them to do from the suggested approaches for softening
the violence as shooting more wild animals and other not humans is
simply shifting the violence to a different target and doesn't change
the 400 kill total one whit and the issues with animal cruelty are no
less disturbing than those underling virtual murder. This is true no
matter how many bullets the Player has and what good is hobbling the
Player's virtual weaponry when in point of fact the opposing targets
may take the form of humans, animals, or zombie aliens but this extend
much further into the abstract as targets can be space invaders,
asteroids, ascii characters... Do these "humans" eat? Do they sleep?
Do they $#!^ shower & shave? If a Player doesn't shoot them do they do
anything else besides attack the Players avatar if detected? Most
importantly here do they possess imagination? Imagination is the rub
in all of this and make no mistake recent studies like one done at
Ohio State show that FPS players preform about a third better on
actual firing ranges than other gamers and non-gamers which preformed
roughly the same in real-world shooting. Particularly chilling was the
statistic showing FPS gamers out doing the rest in head-shots by a
ratio of 2:1 and couple these game specific studies with other
research showing that the placebo effect can be expressed in other
ways such as an exercise study finding those who imagined exercising a
specific muscle showing strength gains about 2/3rds that of the
subjects who actually exercised the muscle which has significant
implications for just what mental muscles We're exercising with modern
games and to what effect? I'd suggest perhaps a couple of sections to
handle Game Theory and Game Philosophy with Game Theory discussing
topics like Why a scripted narrative is incompatible with open-world
gameplay while Game Philosophy could touch on topics like the
implications of spawned resources/antagonists on Player behavior both
virtually and objectively. I don't think the Editorials are the best
place for this as much of the considerations are not opinion and the
access to the sections as a information resource over time is
obviously better than subsumed within the broader Editorial domain
plus the first umpteen articles as theory and philosophy 101 make for
a fairly clear path for a period going forward sufficient to see if
the pig will fly so to speak. I'd really like to see one of the going
concerns with a good talent pool take these subjects on more formally
as I feel it would be timely to do so seeing as gaming is hitting both
the legitimizing profits that establish new mediums as forces to be
reckoned with and the limits of what the current model of the industry
can accomplish as the production budgets force the kind of marketing
adaptations like product placement but when the audience is less
passive and more active in the experience the Recees Pieces being
shown turn into mirco-transactions to see as Your ticket got You into
the theater but it's going to be an extra two bucks to unlock the
packet of M&M's (Y'all didn't think they'd pass up twice did Ya?) to
lure E.T. at the end of act one elseif You'll have to wait until act
three so to speak. As it takes bigger and bigger productions to earn
big profits which can only be so big We are starting to see production
budgets bumping up against that maximum profit limit with Asia seeming
to be a bit ahead of the curve compared to the u.s. and the issues
involved appear to have combined to form ripples running through the
gaming public like the recent topic picked up by a number of gaming
sites postulating on a possible gaming crash like 1983. If I'm reading
the tea-leaves correctly here this is the time when such core concepts
cry for closer consideration and gamesradar would be a particular
favorite personally to see pick up the torch on this one and spark
some debate on what game is in product offered and in potential to
become both in good and in bad as well as what's practical and what's
pipe dream. Someone's gotta shape the industry and I think this should
be on gamesradar... radar. <cue Baba O'Riley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2KRpRMSu4g > I'm out. <mic drop,
exits stage left>
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