I discovered this article just now in scrounging through my daily Digg emails from last month and it just...it just captured exactly where I am so well. Let me quote a key excerpt:
When the first episodes of Life is Strange were released in 2015, reviewers likened them to a Stephen King novel and to “Twin Peaks.” The series was widely embraced, and video game researchers say it is indicative of a shift in the industry. Historically, video games have focused on what characters do below the neck — things like kicking, running, and shooting, Jesse Schell, a game designer and gaming professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote in an email to Undark. Movies and books, meanwhile, were more likely to explore the inner workings of characters’ minds. But more recently, game designers have turned their attention above the neck, too, creating games with complicated plots and emotionally nuanced characters.
That's probably not surprising. Research indicates that many players, particularly longtime gamers who grew up in the 1980s and 90s, now crave games that make them feel something — not just happiness and excitement, but also sadness, guilt, shame, and remorse, said Nick Bowman, a gaming researcher at Texas Tech University. In short, they want the kind of meaningful experience more commonly associated with novels and film. Thanks to technological advancements in graphics and sounds, developers are creating games to meet that demand.
And a modest but growing body of communications and psychology research shows that players do, indeed, feel a wide range of emotions while playing games like Life is Strange. Engaging with unpleasant topics can cause a player to reflect on important real-life issues and “grow as a person,” said Daniel Possler, a media researcher at Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media in Germany. In fact, some research suggests video games are uniquely suited to provide these emotional experiences because they are competitive, interactive, and often social. Still, it is unclear how long these emotions last, or whether feeling them has a downside.
That's me. I'm a long-time gamer who grew up in the '80s and '90s who today values things like emotional range and connecting to characters even more than "fun" per se. Gaming is like a form of therapy for me anymore. I use it that way, for like trying to understand life and find healing and a sense of meaning. I know lots of you prolly regard me as the forum weirdo who likes all those artsy offbeat games nobody plays and uses the term "heartfelt" to excess (
), but I just wanted to show that I am not totally alone in my current approach to this medium.
The article highlights games like Life is Strange, Shadow of the Colossus, and Red Dead Redemption II as examples of art-oriented games and, you know, I don't think all of those are really on the same tier of impact for me, but it captures the crux of what I value the most in games these days. When I first start playing in 1987 my value system was like...
Entertainment: 10
Connection: 0
Now it's like:
Connection: 6
Entertainment: 4
I guess it's just like I get bored with pure entertainment type of material anymore because I've just done so much of that over the years, and I feel like the world is a fairly empty place that I need to understand better to justify living in almost.
Well, it's not too often that research about video game players captures where someone like me is, so I just wanted to highlight this research because it's interesting to me. Does anyone else here feel like this?
Last edited by Jaicee - on 11 December 2021
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