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Gamers and game devs don't know what fun is any more.
4 years ago
A little backstory: I have over 4,000 hours of TF2 experience and have dabbled with comp occasionally. I've also attempted to get into LOL, DOTA, and CS:GO. I tried so hard to appreciate these games, but I gave up a long time ago. Why?
The gamers forgot how to have fun
The game developers forgot how to design for fun
Is that a bold statement? Most definitely, and I'm going to explain my reasoning.
I don't understand why so many people can be so addicted to something they devote so much time to them, while screaming a constant stream of expletives at the same time. Let me summarize a typical game that happens to so many people, whether it's league, dota, tf2, Overwatch etc. doesn't matter: Someone is waiting for at least one idiot on the other team to screw everything up (although it's more often the case your entire team screws up, including you), and then everything snowballs out of control until something at the end of the map blows up, the end.
And who's to say you're even getting on with these people? Because chances are if you're not enjoying yourself, you end up making yourself a target for your own team to play the blame game. Oh yes, the favourite pastime of pissing and whining about who should have been where, and what items you're using and buying, and how THEY would do so much better than you, everything and anything can be used as ammunition on you, where all anyone wanted to do in the first place was sit down and play a game. And what it goes the other way? That you're witnessing players that are obviously not pulling their weight and are just titting around? Some players will have no interest in collaborating with you, and they're playing an entirely different metagame than the one you're playing, which is now negatively impacting the players who DO want to play the way you're playing. And by the time you realise you're not having fun, you won't be able to leave your idiotic team without getting punished. You're literally giving up the next hour of your life to play a high-demand, high-skill game that demands virtually godlike levels of teamwork and attention to succeed with people who, 99% of the time, have no idea what they're doing, and will never be either.
It also makes me laugh every time Blizzard or Valve have some new innovations on how to deal with the problems they've ended up making with every previous patch update to their timesinks. Blizzard seems to think they can 'police' their community by introducing report functions, but sometimes the people they end up penalizing were done so for very unusual weak reasons. Like that team from Fusion University got banned because it was spelt 'FU', or pro players getting banned for their open criticism of the CCP's handling of Hong Kong, or a series of other similarly batshit insane reasons I'm not going to bother researching. Valve just simply doesn't care, where there are STILL active cheats and cheaters plaguing the servers they go to, and as I've previously mentioned before only got lucky the one time, exposed corruption at the highest levels of the pro scene and aren't doing anything else to remedy anything.
By far the most ridiculous implementation in competitive games is the ELO matchmaking system. Oh it works BRILLIANTLY for chess, but not for a multi-faceted and complicated team-game that requires co-operation to succeed, not just raw strategy between two opposing minds. How does this improve ANYTHING? It addresses NONE of the problems I listed above, and in fact it just serves to make them worse. Remember, you're getting paired with other players to kinda sorta match some algorithm. Algorithms aren't complex enough to make these decisions.
And if you do SOMEHOW overcome all of this, what's the reward? A half-hearted congratulations and some banal feeling of achieving something? Did I enjoy it? Really? Five years ago I stopped playing these bullshit games, and I've proven to myself that I've had more fun without them than with them. And as long as I'm playing with friends who don't make my life a misery while playing these games, I'm happy.
I've done washing up that is more fun than playing with randos in public games or comp games.
I could work my way to the top, but I'd never be able to sit down and play with a community that despises itself and everyone else. I'd never have the patience to sit down for an hour with the kind of gamers who make the CoD crowd look less toxic in contrast, just to get good at a game that demands massive amounts of knowledge and ability, only to be eligible for a big circlejerk with other "professionals" at the end.
Fuck TF2
Fuck Overwatch
Fuck CS:GO
Fuck Dota
Fuck League
Fuck bullshit comp games in general
Fuck game devs that don't design good games
Fuck gaming communities
Fuck gaming in general man
If it seems like I'm bitter, I'm not. Gaming communities have been dead to me for a long time, and I don't miss them.
The gamers forgot how to have fun
The game developers forgot how to design for fun
Is that a bold statement? Most definitely, and I'm going to explain my reasoning.
I don't understand why so many people can be so addicted to something they devote so much time to them, while screaming a constant stream of expletives at the same time. Let me summarize a typical game that happens to so many people, whether it's league, dota, tf2, Overwatch etc. doesn't matter: Someone is waiting for at least one idiot on the other team to screw everything up (although it's more often the case your entire team screws up, including you), and then everything snowballs out of control until something at the end of the map blows up, the end.
And who's to say you're even getting on with these people? Because chances are if you're not enjoying yourself, you end up making yourself a target for your own team to play the blame game. Oh yes, the favourite pastime of pissing and whining about who should have been where, and what items you're using and buying, and how THEY would do so much better than you, everything and anything can be used as ammunition on you, where all anyone wanted to do in the first place was sit down and play a game. And what it goes the other way? That you're witnessing players that are obviously not pulling their weight and are just titting around? Some players will have no interest in collaborating with you, and they're playing an entirely different metagame than the one you're playing, which is now negatively impacting the players who DO want to play the way you're playing. And by the time you realise you're not having fun, you won't be able to leave your idiotic team without getting punished. You're literally giving up the next hour of your life to play a high-demand, high-skill game that demands virtually godlike levels of teamwork and attention to succeed with people who, 99% of the time, have no idea what they're doing, and will never be either.
It also makes me laugh every time Blizzard or Valve have some new innovations on how to deal with the problems they've ended up making with every previous patch update to their timesinks. Blizzard seems to think they can 'police' their community by introducing report functions, but sometimes the people they end up penalizing were done so for very unusual weak reasons. Like that team from Fusion University got banned because it was spelt 'FU', or pro players getting banned for their open criticism of the CCP's handling of Hong Kong, or a series of other similarly batshit insane reasons I'm not going to bother researching. Valve just simply doesn't care, where there are STILL active cheats and cheaters plaguing the servers they go to, and as I've previously mentioned before only got lucky the one time, exposed corruption at the highest levels of the pro scene and aren't doing anything else to remedy anything.
By far the most ridiculous implementation in competitive games is the ELO matchmaking system. Oh it works BRILLIANTLY for chess, but not for a multi-faceted and complicated team-game that requires co-operation to succeed, not just raw strategy between two opposing minds. How does this improve ANYTHING? It addresses NONE of the problems I listed above, and in fact it just serves to make them worse. Remember, you're getting paired with other players to kinda sorta match some algorithm. Algorithms aren't complex enough to make these decisions.
And if you do SOMEHOW overcome all of this, what's the reward? A half-hearted congratulations and some banal feeling of achieving something? Did I enjoy it? Really? Five years ago I stopped playing these bullshit games, and I've proven to myself that I've had more fun without them than with them. And as long as I'm playing with friends who don't make my life a misery while playing these games, I'm happy.
I've done washing up that is more fun than playing with randos in public games or comp games.
I could work my way to the top, but I'd never be able to sit down and play with a community that despises itself and everyone else. I'd never have the patience to sit down for an hour with the kind of gamers who make the CoD crowd look less toxic in contrast, just to get good at a game that demands massive amounts of knowledge and ability, only to be eligible for a big circlejerk with other "professionals" at the end.
Fuck TF2
Fuck Overwatch
Fuck CS:GO
Fuck Dota
Fuck League
Fuck bullshit comp games in general
Fuck game devs that don't design good games
Fuck gaming communities
Fuck gaming in general man
If it seems like I'm bitter, I'm not. Gaming communities have been dead to me for a long time, and I don't miss them.
Games are meant to be frivolous and meant to be enjoyable in order to entertain. Yes they can have nice and engaging stories, but all these video game youtube channels that analyze games and gaming culture with undertones in their scrips that make it seems as if it's some high end philosophical and high end culture topic don't understand that majority of games that structurally keep the culture standing do not try to be high thought medias. We're talking about chicks with gaudy neon pick hair and a chubby Italian bing-bing-wahooing.
Even with some games that are meant to be "thought provoking", should it even be warrant to label video games as a medium entirely as culturally as one of the paramounts of human culture when so few video games actually reaches that criteria? (Criteria as in something akin to greater works like Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's attribute to modern English, or even Citizen Kane.)
I think the problem is that " gamers" don't realize that video game is a multimedia format and that the game aspect of that will always be just the glue that holds the other medium formats together (like visuals and audio mediums.) . You may say it's a master piece; but it's just silly to drool over Mario 64's parkour mechanics when the whole point of the mechanics of the game is to be fun and interactive as a toy. Yes I love analysts on game mechanics but my problem is the over valuing of it and treating it as academic and not as a technical hobby. Video game is art but a toy too.
I think video games and interactive art needs to be separated far more if we ever want to see video games to be less unselfawared, superficial and to make it actually more fun and not an excuse for everyone to be overly aggressive on online games, an excuse to over price used video games, and a excuse to treat video games as a cold calculated business like esports or dry competitions.
(hopefully the used games market crashes, sheesh.) Video game is a corporatized entity so most of the time people are talking about low brow/grade stuff too that does not warrant the high pedigree that video games get labelled by "enthusiasts. "
Again games can give great story and atmosphere, but it's still a game and a toy meant to be enjoyed and uplifting as in fun or nice sights. Not culturally or philosophical unless you separate it and focus on doing so by removing the "game" part of it and turn it to interactive art. (And no, walking sims are interactive art not video games. Games needs rules like Scrabble, Solitaire, Hanafuda, othello, or Go Fish which stimulates the human's jovial spirit by being a way to escape superficialness in life and not as a tool to aide the academic or philosophical spirit.)