movement is one of the best things in games and it’s shamefully ignored by almost all developers, their games crushed to meet needs of art production and asset formats
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Yeah! I can immediately decide if a game is going to work (“spark joy” lol) for me within seconds of touching a controller. I think that’s one of the values here that makes SB my logical forum home. Y’know, along with the socialism.
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“Do I have an actual body?” and “Does it feel good to move that body?” are foundational questions for a lot of games for me, yes.
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my real answer:
Most games occupy the part of my brain that is, I think, also the part of my brain that produces the low-level background anxiety that permeates my day-to-day life. This is why my free time goes to games - better than sitting and pondering whatever shit i’m anxious about. If a game isn’t occupying that part of my brain then I stop playing it. That is the bare minimum and accounts for most of the games I play.
On the other hand, the games I truly love inevitably provide two things: a sense of accomplishment, and pure unadulterated joy. Hence: Katamari Damacy being the perfect “me” game. There’s nothing that can make me feel accomplished like growing from the size of a basketball to the size of a small moon, and it’s done in such a joyful way that I can’t help but be completely engulfed by it and come out beaming.
Other big hits in those two departments: Minecraft, F-Zero GX, Sonic Adventure, Factorio, Slime Rancher, Terraria, Super Mario World, Mario Kart 8, Noctis IV.
I think this is why it’s hard for me to distill my taste down to, say, genres or even specific games sometimes. Joy is such an undefinable quality that exists independent of genre, and can be present momentarily only to evaporate for seemingly no reason. Games that used to give me joy are lost to me forever; games that used to frustrate me now provide me with a deep satisfaction. They don’t necessarily share aesthetic similarities either (although the Blue Skies thing does seem to help).
Anyway this has been my journal entry, thank you
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I like creative explorations of systems.
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I play different types of games for different reasons.
There was definitely an element of escapist fantasy in it when I was younger.
Some of my favorite gaming memories include traveling to Gaza in Conquest of Camelot, and traveling around the universe in the Wing Commander games. As a child I didn’t feel very empowered to travel or go on adventures, but I could in video-games.
I like multi-player games a lot. I like to play pool and I like to play Double Dragon II. The same itch is scratched. Video-games can be fun activities to share with other people.
Like sleepysmiles I enjoy games that allow me to put my own stamp on the experience. Games like Battlezone 1998 and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising allowed a great deal of liberty in how to approach them, and I really enjoyed getting to play around in them.
When I was young gaming was my main hobby, and as I got older it sort of shifted into the background. I think it feels healthier being placed among my hobbies, instead of being at the forefront as my main hobby. People who maintain a healthy relation with it as a main hobby usually go into game creation. Creating games allows for more expression then even the most open-ended of game experiences.
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I like bright colors and tiles. What else am I gonna do? Flooring?
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Why Game? A column by The Gamer’s Quarter staff
By J. R. FreemanA few weeks ago, I was playing some games with a friend. My friend is not really much of a “gamer” anymore these days, but that has never stopped me from hanging out with someone. In some instances, it is better to have a non-gamer’s perspective.
So we’re just hanging out in my room one night while I’m playing an Xbox game (I think it was OutRun 2) while he watches. We were talking about school, work, and whatnot when the conversation suddenly died. For a moment the only thing to be heard was the engine of my Ferrari revving and whirring over the delicious Magical Sound Shower from the in-game soundtrack as we both just sat there, momentarily transfixed.
Snapping out of the spell, my friend turns to me and asks “So why do you still do this?”
“Do what?” came the obvious reply.
“Play these games.” He said. “Why do you still play them?”
I sat there for a minute, confused, drifting my shiny red car around a bend in the track. Wondering to myself, what does he mean? Why do I still play these games? Like there’s a reason I should have given them up by now?
“I don’t know,” I told him, “because it’s fun, I guess. And because I get something out of it.”
“Oh really, like what?” He asked, obviously baiting me into some kind of argument over the merits of the video game as an art form. Despite my best efforts I still haven’t been able to convince him that video games can be anything more than mindless entertainment.
“I don’t know, what do you get out of all those movies you watch?” I shot back, knowing he fancied himself a film buff, and knowing that in the past he had faced similar criticisms among some of his non-film buff peers over the merits of film as art.
“Easy.” He said. “Film has the power to speak to me on a personal level that I just haven’t experienced in video games like you have. We’ve been over this, film is an accepted artistic medium.“
“Yeah, but it wasn’t always like that, you know.” I said, trying to concentrate on not driving my pretty car off the road and losing precious time.
“Right, so?” He snorted.
“That’s about where video games are right now, from my view. They are growing to be more and more accepted by the mainstream and as a result people are doing things that can only be done with games. Games like Earthbound, or more recently Metal Gear Solid, have completely redefined people’s definitions of what a game can do or be, and it’s only getting bigger from there.” I said, momentarily contemplating breaking out Katamari Damacy right then and there for him. Perhaps next time, I decided, because my shiny car was coming to a junction in the road, left or right. I chose right.
I sped on down the right junction and left him chewing on that while wondering why I do still play these games? Why does anyone still play them? These people who call themselves “gamers.” What’s it all for, anyway, if you want to get philosophical about it? Why game at all? [editors note: this is usually the point I take a bonghit and trail off in the conversation, har har]
Since I wrote that last paragraph I have flip-flopped between two games. One of them I’m playing to gain better perspective on another game for an article I’m writing with a fellow staffer which may or may not have already been published by now. The other is just a game I enjoy playing because the act of playing is its own reward.
So what am I getting out of it, besides carpal-tunnel syndrome? Relaxation and catharsis? Sure, in some instances. In others, however, I play because I think games as a medium have something to say, or something they could be saying.
I still find them entertaining, of course. That’s part of the prime motivator that keeps me coming back to this hobby. It’s just that I find myself staying with it because the potential for the medium to deepen and mature beyond levels we never expected is constantly there, staring me in the face like my own reflection in the television after the console has been turned off. Boring right through me, to my very core where it shakes me.
There’s that, and the fact that I enjoy actually playing video games. The act of pushing a button, stick or directional pad and seeing something move on the television screen shifts something within me. To have that kind of control over something as abstract as a character in a video game, speaks to something that rests deep inside beyond all the logic and reason. The joy that exists from simply moving something around on your own in this world made up of mathematics is profound.
It is creation from within.
When I play I am creating my own experience, or trying to interpret someone else’s. It moves me on the same level that listening to music or watching a movie does for other people, like my friend who posed the aforementioned question, because of which the experience is more engaging, more personal. Video games could be the first artistic medium to require more than a passive approach to be engaged. Through gaming one is no longer the observer but the participant. Creating and destroying worlds, both commercially built and completely within the imagination of the user, on the fly. A true staple of the modern age, works of art that really speak to you.
They have that potential, at least.
As my pretty red car was rounding its last bend on the way to the finish line I reached over and turned off the console. OutRun 2 and the music and the beautiful blue skies blipped out of existence, leaving only a blank screen. Walking him to the door we made plans to get together again.
“Next time,’ He says, “let’s go to Denny’s or something.”
“Okay.” I agree.
This was my honest answer in 2005. I don’t know what my honest answer in 2019 would be.
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because i was assigned gamer at birth
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the graphics
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There’s no better way to experience killing a clone of yourself in Red Square, using only a dodge ball.
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If anyone knows a better way, do at sign me.
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Intangible emotion. There’s something about the player narrative of Brogue, or the epic setpieces of a Kamiya game, or the chilling ambience of Thief, or the orchestrated pacing of a really good Doom WAD, that remind me why I play games.
Celeste (A Sides)
Celeste (B Sides)
choosing not to finish Celeste (C Sides)
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its art and i value the zeitgeist. i feel like i need to know what kind of images one billion of people are shoving up their mind-ass
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because charging the spur in cave story just feels so good.
holding buttons and letting go in general, i’d say
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Because my parents got me a game boy when I was like 4
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Part of my enjoyment of games is on a toy level. Cool methods of interaction. I love stupid details like rain effects and fake product placements. I like exploring mechanics–the obtuse scoring systems in arcade games and the opaqueness of stuff like King’s Field speak to me.
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Okay I lied, I got into video games so I could appear on The Tester.