Discussion
‘Seeking connection’: the video game where players stopped shooting and started talking
fooker: It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games.Does this serve any purpose?Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.
klondike_klive: A while ago when I got Resident Evil on the Wii. I found myself really fed up and depressed with the pee and poo coloured levels and relentless misery (maybe I should have known better than to rent Resident Evil!)I had the idea of taking classic 3d videogame levels and landscaping them with flowers and benches. Executive function got the better of me, I but I still muse about it from time to time.
darkteflon: I mean, the really good ones can be beautiful, terrifying, balletic displays of dominance, skill and tactical intelligence. There’s nothing in all of gaming quite like being hunted by a human being. It’s a real thrill.
anthonj: I remember a lot of online servers from the Jedi Knight series where people would spend a lot of time talking (well.. writing in chat), messing around, making friendly duels or exploring weird custom mmaps.It was kinda weird considering the game type.
viktorcode: The game smartly sorts players into lobbies based on their aggressiveness towards others. And this is where it diverges from real life scenarios.
philipwhiuk: It's not really that complex.Humans have historically been better competition than AI. Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.> Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.Someone should have told the US Army: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army(Surprisingly for a government project it was pretty playable)
pawelduda: It's often just a part of a broader puzzle - you need to aim with precision, react quickly, properly chain your movements, be aware of your surroundings, know when to be offensive/defensive, apply your tools/skills to specific situation, manage your resources, etc. Shooting is just a subset of all that.With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.
aggakake: People sort themselves into cliques and bubbles all the time?
the_gipsy: If you could pick PvP/Coop, then this would be a non-story.So this is kind of something that has not been disclosed that makes TFA... less of a story.
Tade0: Yes, but the guy waiting for you in a dark alley is definitely not part of your clique.
kreco: I don't mind shooting.But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.
astoor: > "It has always puzzled me a little bit that shooting is a core mechanic in a majority of video games. Does this serve any purpose?My personal theory is that violent video games (and films and other media) are encouraged in highly militarised societies to desensitise their populations to violence - if you normalise it so it all seems like a game or other form of entertainment, you get a lot less internal opposition when you go about killing real people in other countries.
trinsic2: Hmm. This take is a bit much IMHO. I think it just like any sport. Competition. Combat tactics is a pretty diverse way to play competitively.
Tade0: > Writing AI that is evenly matched with a human so as presenting a challenge that is tough but not unwinnable is much harder than just playing against another person.Also humans are uniquely... human.I play one of those extraction shooters and even a much higher ranked player, who would normally have no issue downing my team of three in an open fight, will eventually get worn down if we hide around and harass them. Also they might just lose patience earlier and start making mistakes due to that.Hard to model something like this because people are different and react in complex ways.
homeonthemtn: Hopefully we come full circle back to game lobbies. Game lobbies and fixed servers were the micro communities this article is dancing around. It worked remarkably well in the early days. I know I certainly miss it
rolandog: Yeah, though I would argue that we as a society would be way better off if the same scrutiny that was applied a few years ago due to the "woke panic" were applied to modern day content about pro- you-name-it propaganda (military, othering, etc.).Nowadays, you see that in the masterful omission of facts when news are reported (e.g. why aren't illegal trade embargoes mentioned when talking about poverty and instability in certain countries? Why are there no reactions when the thing they were confidently showing turned out to be false or GenAI?), or the way things are portrayed in videogames (why are enemies in military shooters almost always middle eastern? why don't you have to fight off racists, fascists, and corporate militia?), or the movies (why do we get shown mostly content where a single individual carries the sole responsibility of taking on the single villain?).Sorry for the rant; games are indeed beautiful... There's some things I've been starting to pay attention to where you have to swallow or brush aside some propaganda so that you're allowed to play with your friends... And that makes me a bit upset.
incomingpain: Friendly Hoovies offer peace Sandviches and talk.Next level, you medic and heal the hoovies. Winning every round automatically by not fighting.
Insanity: Some games explored shooting dogs (CoD and BF both had this at some stage iirc). The reception to that was much more negative than shooting humans.Edit: but I know you mean shooting aliens or something similar.
Insanity: Many games with a dedicated servers browser back in the early 2000s just turned into chatrooms at night. I’ve seen that even in games that this article calls out as being just about “shooting” like cs. But it happened on ET, CoD, JK, etc.
moregrist: There are plenty of real life examples of this, from softball leagues that self-sort based of levels of seriousness / competitiveness / aggressiveness, to people actively avoiding going into areas like investment banking or high-pressure sales because they have a reputation of being very aggressive.You can’t always avoid people who are aggressive towards others, but I’ve found that my life is a lot more stressful when I work with aggressive people, so I actively try to avoid these situations and work in more collaborative environments.
wafflemaker: When playing EvE online many years ago, I was surprised by one enemy militia player.Context: we were living partially in low sec systems where PvP was allowed. That's where PvP players from big alliances came when there were no 5k ppl fights for system control.I've noticed one enemy player consitently being very chivalry about fights. He returned loot to less experienced people he won a fight with and was always humble in both defeat and victory. He even once returned a very expensive module that dropped from my ship after he won a fight with me. And that showed clearly I wasn't a new player that needed taking care off.That taught me a lot about playing and general behavior in life. That it's not always about your results, but it's always about your style.
Groxx: My first "player encounter" was with someone who patiently took me through many of the basics for over an hour at the very beginning (like 15 minutes in), then tricked me into attacking them so they could blow me up and get away with it.That's the kind of troll I love. Technically they taught me another useful thing in the process, and it cost me effectively nothing because I could just reroll the character. High effort and low payoff is the best kind.
wafflemaker: It might surprise you, but the tutorial nowadays actually gets you blown up twice. It's so strange, that the game actually tells you what to do now and you don't have to ask in help.
nemomarx: You might like something closer to powerwash sim?
strangegecko: IMO this is aggressively unfriendly to the rest of the team that didn't consent to part of the team refusing to play.There are so many other ways to chat and make friends without breaking tem balance.
tmtvl: I'm not certain that shooting is a core mechanic in a strict majority of video games (may also depend on how you define shooting, is flinging fireballs around shooting?).But aside from that, Campster argued in his video about violence in games (<https://youtu.be/wSBn77_h_6Q>) that violence is easier to program in an accessible way than nonviolence.
ekidd: Yeah, ARC Raiders has a lobby system to sort people by aggressiveness.Which is interesting, because the early Steam reviews loved the fact that the game was mostly cooperative. Most players were helpful or neutral, but some would attempt to kill you. This meant that running into other players was tense. Would they heal you? Would they help you take down a machine? Or would they rob you? You had to guess, and guess quickly.Then there was a big influx of Twitch viewers who were just there for PvP.I actually think the "mostly cooperative but not always" dynamic is a really interesting vibe, but probably a hard one for the developers to maintain.
nmeofthestate: Shooting isn't the core mechanic in the majority of video games.
user3939382: The most prolific violent video game is Minesweeper. The fidelity may be low but the little guy dies and mines are powerful weapons detonating all over in the game.
yetihehe: One error and the whole level just blows up.
intended: Video games are incredible for the kinds of mini experiments and insights on human nature they throw up.Player driven economies are a case in point. Everyone joins the game at the same level, and same handicap. Yet you end up with the same power law dynamics of wealth concentration.Gaming is also one industry that does real research on online toxicity, and one of the more motivated sectors to finding a way to balance it out.This is something that makes the frequency of cooperation in Arc Raiders somewhat anomalous.
i_c_b: There are a lot of properties that game mechanics can have that make people invest in games. Legible rules, clear feedback, deterministic and discrete cause and effect, clearly understandable win conditions and game states, being relatively simple to implement in code, having properties that make discrete variations and permutations of gameplay situations easy to build and easy to parse for players, setting rules up in ways that can be structured with real-time pressure, often embedded in large spatial structures to organically pace an experience...Shooting (and combat more generally) has proven to be pretty easy to make satisfy most of these criteria. There are other core styles of actions that do as well (say, 2d Platforming, or clean puzzle mechanics like in games like Tetris).These mechnical factors matter, because it's often the case that people who don't like violence in games would prefer games to focus on other kinds of challenges that they find more socially good in terms of morality or ideology. But then they stomp all over the mechanical styles of issues I was just listing above, and the results is predictably game designs broad masses of players don't want to play.I've worked on both AAA hyperviolent games, as well as with educators on learning games with what they saw as pro-social game play, so this is a divide I've had front row seats to.And to make what I hope is a productive contrast, one of the really great things about Undertale is that the designer didn't make being peaceful in the game lame. It is (or was for me) actively fun to try to figure out how to not kill enemies, because you still have to engage in bullet hell dodging while you try to psychoanalyze your opponents, and that dodging (for players who like those kinds of mechanics) still maintained a lot of the properties I just listed above.To make a more real-world comparison, my father-in-law was an extremely successful junior college tennis coach, and he has noted in passing that he couldn't personally see how anyone could invest in Olympic sports like figure skating, just on the level of taking the competition that seriously. And his argument (he wasn't being universalizing, particularly, just tying it to his experience as an award winning coach) was that the extreme subjectivity of judge ratings was really offputting to him, as a competitor. Obviously tennis can have bad line calls and other controversial judge issues, too - all human sports can. But I think his argument ties in with my original one here; a lot of game players really like clean, legible rules with clear good and bad states so they can invest in getting good at games and take pleasure in their good play. And, as I say, shooting and combat at this point often fulfills that well.
adzm: I'd love to mention the Endless Forest, an artistic game from nearly twenty years ago where you were a deer and there were no real goals and communication was entirely with deer gestures and sounds. The idea was great and it was fun finding random other people (as deer) and exploring the fantasy world together.
tetris11: Same with Journey, a beautiful landscape that you traversed with other nameless ones, mirroring each other's actions and falling into a cohesive unspoken group mindset
lamasery: I really, really wanted a non-violent mode in Far Cry 5 for my son. If a mode that removed the hostiles and weapons had existed I can guarantee that would have been my son’s (he was probably about 6 at the time?) favorite game for a couple years straight. Flying and driving around rural Montana landscapes, fishing, watching wildlife? He’d have spent 20x more time in that mode than I did beating the game ordinarily. Super bonus points for two-player local multiplayer so we could play together.(It came frustratingly close to this if you kept playing after beating the game, but there were still guns and still some hostiles wandering around, IIRC)
