OssK

Please, tell me...

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...Why do you play?

And I mean, in an interesting way, spend some time thinking about it, then tell me what your favorite game is. As in, a game that changed your life, that changed your views on a matter, an experience unique in what it awakes in your mind.

I love Tetris as much as the next guy but there has to be more to playing Tetris than just "i play it because it's fun". No, it's not fun, just look at someone playing Tetris and you'll see by the blank expression on their face that they are not having the same kind of fun that kids running around with sticks have or used to have.

Did fun get a new definition, or is it another kind of fun?

I'm mostly interested in non-competitive experience because I kind of know the thrill of competition and it's effects

So... why do you play God of War ? Why do you play Peggle or Skyrim ?

Thank you

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I love the escapism of games, but there's also the satisfaction of "achieving" something.

And how would you then define "achieving" in between virtual worlds and reallity ?

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First of all, I don't like the stigma of not being able to enjoy games simply for being 'fun.' The reason most people do anything is because it's fun. Watching TV is fun, sports are fun, drinking and having sex is fun. Why try and attach an awkward self-important definition to what is essentially just another human pastime?

Also, there are internal and external forms of expressing enjoyment. Running around playing tag or another activity that requires physical exertion is by necessity going to be more extroverted. But when you play tetris or a similar game that requires very intense concentration, your thought process is internalized. There's less overt communication, it's just a completely different activity. Instinctual and reactionary vs hypothetical and intellectual. But dopamine can be released by a variety of different inputs, so while the activity may be different, the result (fun) will be the same.

So I guess that's a complicated way of saying I play games because they're fun. Though you're right it bears discussing what makes different kinds of games and activities fun. (Liking a game for being challenging or liking an immersive experience or liking playing god for example)

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And how would you then define "achieving" in between virtual worlds and reallity ?

My brain is tricked into thinking it's doing something productive.

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First of all, I don't like the stigma of not being able to enjoy games simply for being 'fun.' The reason most people do anything is because it's fun. Watching TV is fun, sports are fun, drinking and having sex is fun. Why try and attach an awkward self-important definition to what is essentially just another human pastime?

Now now, i'm not saying it has to not be fun, I'm saying it can be something else, more, less, different, I don't really care to define that in the question as in to answer in your stead, but my interest is that you give me more than a one liner.

When journalists go about in the street and ask people, the only answer they get it "duh, because they're derp fun derp". And I'm not interested in that.

I'm looking for something else, more complex. A peek if you will into what fun is to you, what do you find fun and how you go at earning your fun.

Now to me, fun is what we called the practicing of activities that we developed while engineering our way around boredom. What used to be an intellectual evolutive mecanism pushing us forward by not allowing us to just eat, fuck, sleep like most animals do, is a need we feed with distraction and entertainment.

I'm all for it, I'm just asking for the way, in a sense, in which YOUR boredom manifests. What are you looking for in a game that plays your chords ?

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I play because the voices in my head tell me to.

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I never stop playing because the next achievement is just within reach, just two more minutes

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Skyrim was the one game in recent memory where, looking back, I'm kind of torn about whether I had any fun playing it or not. Mostly I think the devs took advantage of that obsessive nature many gamers have by having everyone and their dog (literally) give you quests so that you'd spend hours running all over the land completing fairly minimal quests that led to others and so on. So it was like trying to clean off a ledger sheet that kept filling up over and over. It felt fun at the time but if someone asked me if I wanted to do that now I'd probably tell them to fuck right off.

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I'm definitely in it for the experience, or the memories. Hence my general disdain for "casual" games and my prevalence for MMOs/multiplayer games.

For instance, during the later days of my time in WoW, I set up a weekly trivia quiz in Orgrimmar. Every Sunday, a always surprising number of people would show up and answer the most inane and thought provoking trivia questions I could come up with. Mostly for in-game money, sometimes for rare or neat items. By the time I stopped doing it there were even a few low level orc and troll alts (they start very near Orgrimmar, the main Horde city) of Alliance players decked out in full twink gear because of their answers.

I'll always remember that experience in general, but I'll never forget things like the half-hour argument over what tense was used in Nietzsche's famous abyss quote. Utterly pointless, but highly entertaining.

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I'm definitely in it for the experience, or the memories. Hence my general disdain for "casual" games and my prevalence for MMOs/multiplayer games.

For instance, during the later days of my time in WoW, I set up a weekly trivia quiz in Orgrimmar. Every Sunday, a always surprising number of people would show up and answer the most inane and thought provoking trivia questions I could come up with. Mostly for in-game money, sometimes for rare or neat items. By the time I stopped doing it there were even a few low level orc and troll alts (they start very near Orgrimmar, the main Horde city) of Alliance players decked out in full twink gear because of their answers.

I'll always remember that experience in general, but I'll never forget things like the half-hour argument over what tense was used in Nietzsche's famous abyss quote. Utterly pointless, but highly entertaining.

this answer, amongst others, i like a lot.

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Mostly I think the devs took advantage of that obsessive nature many gamers have

Probably not intentionally, though. Many developers also share that same obsessive nature and probably fool themselves into thinking they also enjoy it.

I know damn well I don't enjoy stuff like that, but I find myself doing it often anyway, because there's something else I enjoy and those mundane, repetitive tasks give me an excuse to continue enjoying that Something Else. Usually it's the core mechanics, like combat, or the idea of really getting into the role of my character. (Which is why I have no interest in Skyrim, unfortunately.)

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I play because I like to interact with systems and push them to their limits / see how they can be flipped to be abusive to themselves.

I play because I like experiencing narratives but hate reading books (which I just posted about elsewhere on the forum).

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I got my N64 the birthday after my father died. I was turning 11 and, though I'd had an SNES before then, that was when I got into gaming heavy. It's been a safe space ever since then. Specifically, I got Ocarina of Time with my system and whenever my life starts feeling like it's spiraling away from me, I find that dipping into whatever the latest Zelda game may be gives me a feeling of control back in my life. It may specifically be the combination of familiar elements in new settings that draws me to that series as my comfort place in particular, seeing that no matter how many things change in the medium there always seems to be a place for Link, Zelda, and Ganon. There is definitely an escapist bent to my gaming, especially with regard to that series.

Other times, it's curiosity with regards to what the medium is able to achieve. I think that one of the coolest things this generation has been the stability of your main character across the Mass Effect games. Regardless of what the third brings (I'm still wrapping up my replay of 2 before I start it), that is worth sitting up and paying attention to. Experimentation with narrative or lack there of is fascinating to me. It isn't something that I would have cared about when I was younger, but as an adult it gives me hope that gaming may actually be maturing bit by agonizing bit. It's happening slowly enough to cause me to conceal the fact that I'm a gamer from new acquaintances, but I take my solace where I can get it.

As a pre-service (read: one year of university left) teacher, I've been reading a lot about the difficulties in finding the balance between stagnation and frustration for students, and the same easily applies to "fun". The fact that I've spent so much time experiencing it for myself with games is probably part of why this felt like old news while my professors talked about how revolutionary this thinking is. Much the same way that a student who has mastered the material gets absolutely nothing from continuing to drill in it, when you're great at a game it stops being fun. I used to blow through every game I played on easy and not think about them at all. Because of this, I nearly stopped gaming altogether a couple of years back. I decided to crank the difficulty and suddenly gaming became "fun" again. Basically, fun for me is just enough of a challenge to feel like the game is taunting me but not enough difficulty to get me to turn off the game. Games that ride the edge of that don't need to be narratively interesting or do anything else to be great (see: Vanquish). Games that come close just need a little extra push from something else to be loved (see: Mass Effect getting the "crazy detailed world" bump). Again, when you've been playing games for a long time this doesn't sound like much new, but apparently it's mind-blowing for the education community so worth a mention.

The last reason I game is actually nearly unrelated to the games themselves. It's the same reason I've been meeting the same group of people once a week for the last 7 years since graduating high school to play board games. The games are there as a gathering point, not as the objective. Sometimes something awesome comes out of them, but most of the time I'm just using them as an excuse to chill with people I like. The Grand Thumb Auto and Formula Thumb games from the last few years are definitely that, as was playing co-op Portal with Patters when the game and later DLC came out. Sure, one of my favourite gaming stories from 2011 came out of that as well, but most of the time it was just cool to be chilling with Patters and brainstorming Portal solutions.

Of course, sometimes I just need to have a day where I shut my brain off and gratify the "loud noises and explosions" part of myself, but I'd say that the above are the four main reasons I game. Note that the "just challenging enough" one could apply to anything from character action complexity to puzzles in an adventure game. Dexterity to intelligence and anywhere in between, all are a valid challenge.

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That's a damn interesting question, OssK.

I thought about escapism, but that didn't seem particularly true or insightful. I think, on a fundamental level, I like interaction. I press a button and something happens. I control a thing. As I grew older I started expecting and demanding more complication and more interesting ways of interaction, but what draws me is still the concept of inputting an action and something (hopefully exciting! Hopefully original and surprising!) happening in the game.

This is why I like picking up coins in say, Mario Bros. I don't care about points or a score, I never did. That doesn't interest me. I don't give a crap about the competitive side of gaming. I like it because picking up coins is an interesting interaction with the game. Something happens, I hear a sound, the game has changed because of my actions.

I also realize that this is the primary reason I love(d) adventure games so much. The amount of (contextual) diversity in interaction is by a long stretch the largest there. You have a fully fleshed-out world to interact with. You can discover things in the background, explore characters on screen, pick up objects, solve puzzles and do tons of other things. Almost every other genre is lacking in comparison. Most games treat a background as eyecandy, as atmosphere, without any interaction possible. Assassin's Creed offers at least the possibility of climbing scenery and using it to strategic effect, but even that's not as good as an adventure where you just didn't know what would be important and what would be possible at the next turn.

It's interactivity, plain and simple. The more variety and surprise a game can offer (Psychonauts, adventure games, Resident evil 4, Half Life 2), the better. It is ultimately what drives me to pick up a new game and start playing. Who knows what exciting new interactions it will offer?

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Interesting topic.

While there are a lot of interesting and enjoyable aspects about games, the big one for me is immersion, more specifically the chance to have an experience that would otherwise not be accessible to me.

If a game can present me with a world or a thematic and put me right into it without presenting any expectations concerning my role in it, I am pretty much hooked. Not so much in a way where I as a player am presented with a challenge that I have to solve with a predefined set of tools, but rather the game establishing a setting and then asking me: "Now, what would you do?"

Since the question also was for the favorite game, Fallout 3 is a prime example. The role I am playing is only very loosely predefined (as James' kid and with all the problems that arise from that relationship) and there is a choice of possible skillsets I have to make. Some of them may be more viable than others, but if I for example decided I wanted to forgo any form of firearm in favor of punching things in the face, then that is my choice, even if it may be not as effective. It's not so much about replay value for me, since all I want to do here is figure out what suits me and stick to it, it is about the choice and the acknowledgement that, if this is indeed what I want to do, I have the choice of it being a represantation of myself inside the world I've been presented with. Furthermore there is no handholding in the form of "okay, now go here, ice level!". I don't care much for open-endedness in itself, but the notion of a world that exists and persists on its own merit without revolving around my person. That is what Fallout 3 has achieved masterfully in my opinion. There's really no outstanding story to speak of or any sort of dramatic structure or rollercoaster ride. What it is, though, and what I enjoyed a lot, is this very outlandish postapocalyptic world that doesn't actively try to appeal to me, but just exists. It is up to me to explore it, its possibilities and its background.

There is this one house in the minefield for example, where you find two skeletons embracing on the bed of the bedroom, two shots of morphine on the nightstand. The player is never required to visit the house (or the entire minefield for that matter), the house has nothing to offer in terms of value, be it some outrageous loot or advancement of the plot and even if you entered it, you could just miss the entire scene, don't care about it or interpret it differently. When I went in, though, having dodged dozens of mines, scavenging for loot, I found a scene that completely took me out of "I am playing a game" mode: whether I found it or not (and i wasn't forced to), it existed, completely unrelated to my person or the "epic quest" I was involved in and without any words it conveyed a little bit of story (not my story and that's the big one) to me, filled me in on what happened here long before my character was even born presumably - and then I would just leave the scene, powerless to that situation, unable to do anything about it, it was just there and it left an impact on me.

At the same time the world acknowledged me, though, not the character I played, but the character as a direct extension of myself, contrary to how situations like those would be experienced in the context of a movie or a book. I was constantly having an impact on that world around me on a smale scale. Presented with the problems of different people, most of them not clear-cut good or evil, I'd have to make a choice, if I wanted to solve their problems, in what way, to what end and then how I'd go about it in the context of the possibilities of my character.

These aspects would interweave, too. The choice whether to blow up Megaton or to disarm the bomb seems so straightforward in terms of moral implications at the time, but if you dig a little bit deeper you find out that the residents of Megaton, who welcome you as accepting as you can expect in that world, actually have loads of dirt on them and in any other game they could be painted as the "evil" ones you actually have to go up against. In this game, though, it is your choice. It is a choice that does not matter to the world as a whole or your progress in it, but to you as the kind of person you are representing.

I guess this comes across as a bit of a review/sales pitch, but those are the examples I can think of that demonstrate the message I always enjoy receiving from a game: this world exists, what will your role be in it?

Mass Effect 2 was another one of those, although in a different fashion. Basically regardless of the choices I made (because they seemed not to matter that much and just served to make me more accepting of the role of Shepard I was playing), but it also presented a world that just existed and was up to me to explore (even though I would have a big impact on this world on every possible scale). Not so much in terms of places and situations within the main plot, but rather the background and thematics that may be viewed differently in our present day context (and to an extent indeed are by the humans in the game). To me the game felt like bringing up a lot of interesting and delicate topics and while my character only had very little choice in how to deal with them, they made me reflect personally a bit and it was simply interesting to explore this vast world that has these very complicated (for game setting standards, at least) interactions and relations within itself instead of just being human problems in space and to just exist in a literally alien world without the game expecting me to shoot things in the face non stop.

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I also realize that this is the primary reason I love(d) adventure games so much. The amount of (contextual) diversity in interaction is by a long stretch the largest there. You have a fully fleshed-out world to interact with. You can discover things in the background, explore characters on screen, pick up objects, solve puzzles and do tons of other things.

That! Interactivity. the reaction in the game world to your actions. And especially when that varies. That's why I had so much fun with Windosill. It's all unique interactivity. But of course, like adventure games, that doesn't last you very long. That's at least one of the reasons I play games.

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Ok, so i've been thinking about this question a bit, and have a lot of possible answers.

In the most reductive sense, i love video games because they're awesome, and video games are awesome to me because i love them. I started playing games when i was a kid, and that was it, it was over for me. They're stuck in my brain.

Narrowing it down for the sake of being interesting, one of things that crossed my mind while mulling this over is that i just enjoy seeing elegantly designed game systems that are equipped to play out in interesting and sophisticated ways. Having rules that can be stressed by knowledgeable and skilled players without crumbling, particularly in the context of a good action game. Having a simple set of tools where every option presented is a valuable one for some permutation of the scenario.

I admire the hell out of that, i think that can beautiful to experience.

I don't want to go to the "It's like Chess" thing, but... You know.

That doesn't really cover everything though, to me RPG's tend to be about exploring the developer's constructed world, for example. I also just love chasing new kinds of experiences, seeing what else the medium is capable of. (I have ended up with an incredibly schizophrenic library of games on account of this.)

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I play casual games when I have a few minutes here and there. They're quick, they don't require hours to complete. I have got more into 'casual' games (e.g. Doodlejump) simply because I don't have as much time as I used to - campsite business, work, etc. etc. I also don't play 'big' games as such because I just can't be bothered any more. Rome Total War for instance. It's impossible to have a 'quick' go on that. Back when I wasn't as gainfully employed as I now am, I had the time and inclination to do a 14 hours session straight on that game. I have neither now. FPS' I can play for a weekend, and then get bored of them. Games that keep me coming back are ones that you *can* have a quick blast on and still progress, e.g. Trials HD/Evolution, Wipeout, Forza (and you can still play them for ages too if you want!)

I also play games because I'm lazy, and it's easy. For instance, I sit down and think, "Right, I've really got to progress with my coding", or, "This database won't write itself!", hit a stumbling block, and because it's easier than figuring out the problem, I get distracted and go and do something that I can do more easily. Brain is engaged in a different way, but I'm not getting things done.

Not very coherent, sorry.

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I could be really blunt and say because it triggers the release of dopamine, thus giving my brain and body a reward.

That's technically true, but I guess you want to know why the games trigger this release.

Well, for me, it's stories. I can play games like Tetris, but that is just mindless passing of time. But a game with a story is like a good book. A good story can make me play a genre I normally don't play, like FPS. I really enjoyed playing Bioshock. Of course, the gameplay has to be engaging too, because for me to force myself through a game, the story really has to be exquisite.

So the genres that I tend to play are RPGs, Adventure Games, with some exceptions. Bioshock was said exception to me not liking FPS. Also, single player is important, because usually multiplayer does not offer as much story as the single player campaign. Especially in the case of MMORPGs. You can build up a world, but if you stay away too long, you lose track. I don't need another world to keep track of 24/7, real life is enough. Single player is ideal in that you can go out and do something, and when you come back, the world won't have changed from when you left off.

I have played Multiplayer, but only in the form of modules for NWN with a group of friends.

Oh, and some strategy games are fun too. In that case it's like chess: It is a mental achievement. You have truly beat the game.

So yeah, it's mostly the stories. To me an unfinished story (lots of that in NWN fan made modules, sadly. Classic scenario of the modder losing interest. But there's also lots of complete stories, so that's a relief at least.) is terrible. When I finish a good story, I am always a bit sad. It feels like something is missing, giving you an empty feeling. Like you've lost something in your life, but also the happiness of having experienced it. That's a sign of a well told story for me. It doesn't have to be a happy ending all the time, sometimes a happy ending would ruin it. Or a sequel (thinking of all those guys demanding a sequel to the Baldur's Gate Saga: Stop it! This series is perfect, it has come to a perfect end. Adding on to it would simply ruin it. Yes, I want another game *LIKE* Baldur's Gate. But no sequel to it. :( ).

So the reason I play is experiencing new worlds, learning new tales. Like watching a good movie, but different. More like a great book, actually.

'nuff said.

- :yep: :yep: :yep: :yep: :yep: :yep: :yep:

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To learn becoming better at a game, not making the same mistakes.

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