the-pandering-fool

[the-pandering-fool]

Disconnection is it a good thing?

In a world where video games are as prevalent as they are plentiful, how do they disconnect us from reality in a way we can kill and steal from just about anyone and feel no remorse? More importantly, is that a good thing?

At their core video games are an escape from reality that allow us (the player) to do things we never thought possible, or that we’ve always wanted to do without any real consequence. It’s because of this that many people love them, they can slay dragons and save the princess, be what they aren’t, and do so from the comfort of their own homes.

Being able to do impossible things has always driven mankind to great heights, it drove the Wright Brothers to build the first (functional) planes, Thomas Edison to make the incandescent light bulb and the phonograph. Needless to say it can accomplish amazing things. It’s what led people to make the first narrative driven games, they were a marvel of entertainment, for the first time rather than just being an observer you were the hero. These games gave you control and made an experience uniquely its own, like salted caramel. It’s a wonderful thing they do letting anyone be anything for any reason.

Let’s take an example of  a relatively recently released game Monster Hunter World (let’s call it MHW from here on out). In MHW you take on the role of a Hunter, someone who hunts Monsters - giant dangerous beasts with strange abilities - for science. I know that sounds a bit weird but we’ll talk about that later. What we’re going to talk about now, is how MHW uses common strategies in media to make players follow it’s narrative, not feel bad about hunting the dozens of monsters, harvesting their skin to craft various weapons and armor, and to keep hunting.

Most video games use some common strategies to make the player  feel like they’re not responsible for any bad decisions they make. One of these strategies  is called dissociation — in other words, disconnecting the player from the character they’re playing. In MHW one thing the do to achieve this is they never call you by name, instead they give you the title of Hunter or occasionally call you Fiver (a title given because you are from the 5th research fleet). They also call every other Hunter this too so don’t feel special just yet. By doing this they make you feel less important and like you’re one of many, and it’s not a bad thing to start with. MHW draws a clear line between you and your expectations, but also leave room for interpretation and character development, saying you have to earn your place here, and until you do you’re just a gear in the machine. And eventually you do, in the end you are granted the title of Sapphire Star, this title has significance in the lore of MHW so it’s quite an honor for you to have.

It’s not an easy road to earn your place in the world though, you need to be a skilled Hunter and craft some pretty strong gear to beat the final boss in MHW. You might be asking what I mean by “crafting strong gear”,  in MHW progression is both locked by story, player skill, and gear. This means that you’ll have to keep hunting specific monsters to harvest materials, or mats, to make better weapons and armour so it doesn’t take an hour to kill a monster or you don’t die by a sneeze from a stronger one. Monster slaying is exactly what the game wants  the player to do as well! By locking things behind progression walls the game makes you play more and more to fight stronger and cooler monsters.

In MHW the payer is given many ways to hunt as well. There are 14 different weapon classes each with their own unique set of skills and fighting styles. And let me tell you choosing just one is extremely hard. I myself use about 4 of them on a regular basis, the Insect Glaive (IG), Charge Blade (CB), Longsword (LS), and Switch Axe (SA). These names alone probably don’t mean much to you do they? I’m gonna get a bit technical here so if you’re not as big a nerd as I am skip ahead to the next part which I’ll mark with an * for you.

Now allow me to get into the nitty gritty of the IG for you as it is my personal favorite weapon. The IG is a powerful weapon used to give a player a much needed aerial advantage in combat. It has two main features which are its ability to propel a hunter into the air and stay there, and the Kinsect.

The Kinsect is your own little buggy buddy that helps you hunt more effectively by gathering different extracts from monsters. These extracts are categorized by color, red is attack, by collecting it your moveset changes and you’re able to dish out more damage, orange is defense/resistance, it gives you a small buff to your defense and elemental resistances, white is an amplifier, it boosts the effectiveness of the other extracts, and finally there’s green, it heals you just a little bit. And this is just 1 of 14 different weapon archetypes you can use. They also get even more complicated as well so there’s definitely a learning curve involved, but if you can master a weapon practically nothing can stop you.

*Some of you might be arguing that we as the player are destroying the ecosystem by going out and slaughtering these creatures and that’s wrong. It’s true that if you were to go out on a mission to kill every squirrel in existence you would damage the ecosystem. However in MHW every monster you hunt is an apex predator, meaning they’re at the top of the food chain and the only thing that they have to worry about are the other monsters you’ll eventually hunt.

Plus you need to have a suspension of belief to properly enjoy most games anyway, meaning you need to recognize that what you’re doing has no real world consequences. You can hunt a Legania a thousand times and you’re still gonna have to go to work on Monday.

I talked about the fact that you are hunting for science earlier and it’s true. In MHW you are exploring a brand new continent, dubbed the new world, and have very limited information on the creatures that live there. So it’s your job not only to hunt these monsters but to study them. You can even capture them and bring them back to your base so the rest of the research team can examine them further, this might not be the smartest way to do it, but hey it works. MHW encourages this by giving you bounties to hunt specific monsters and rewarding you with currency and mats. Plus the more you hunt a monster the better you get at it. You’re able to track them better, learn their individual quirks, such as what the best element to use while hunting them is. And you can do it with each of the many monsters making mayhem and mischief. Over time you learn their habits, you learn their weaknesses, and you learn their faults.

One of my personal favorite monsters from MHW is the aforementioned (and shown above yay for gifs!) Legania. It is, on the most basic level, an ice dragon. The Legania is also a ‘boss’ monster, it’s the true apex predator of one of the environments. At first the Legania is a pain in the ass to hunt, it’s nimble, has a variety of AOE attacks, and can fly. If you jump right in and try fighting it Leroy Jenkins style you’re probably gonna get carted (die) a few times.

On the other hand if you stay back and watch how it moves and interacts with the environment, you’ll learn that when it lands it becomes extremely vulnerable, and that you can force it to land in some places by placing bait. The game rewards you for playing the way it wants you to. Just like any other game there are proper ways to play where you get the best results.

Another strategy MHW uses is Immersion. It creates a world that makes sense and draws the player in. It accomplishes this by showing how the different creatures interact in the areas you explore. The player is constantly reminded how dangerous their job is by seeing the more docile herbivores eaten and hunted by the dominant predators. Even the predators fight in aptly named “turf wars”. The player can be hunting one creature and out of nowhere a bigger, stronger one can finish the job by flinging it around like a chew toy. In some instances you can also find two monsters fighting over food, or their hunting grounds overlap and they proceed to fight for dominance, the loser leaving the area wounded but still alive.

By giving players attainable goals, an immersive world, unique and challenging opponents, and many ways to play MHW does a great job disconnecting players from the real world. Yes, getting too lost in a game is a bad thing, but sometimes that’s exactly what someone needs. By giving players an outlet to forget the chaos of the world around them video games are an amazing thing. Moderation is the key to not only enjoying, but enjoying video games healthily. That’s right, it’s as simple as mere moderation. So next time you have a bad day, or maybe just need to shut out the day to day chaos of the world, grab a controller, hit up your friends, and just lose yourself in a good game.

[the-pandering-fool]

Pokemon is the best TBRPG.

The Pokemon series is one that many people look at fondly, it brings back memories of childhood for some and for others it’s one of the games they’re playing right now. Whether young or old it’s hard to deny that Pokemon not only has the charm to enthrall audiences but the mechanics to make long time gamers come back again and again to challenge themselves in the iconic rock, paper, scissors combat. And it’s those very reasons that make Pokemon one of - if not the - greatest Turn-based Role-playing Game (TBRPG) of all time.

To prove this to you, first we have to go over what makes any RPG good and to clarify we are focusing on only the core games not the spinoffs. The three factors that go into this are story, replayability, and style.

When the first Pokemon games released in Japan back in February of 1996 story, wasn’t a very big part of gaming especially not for handheld gaming. Even so the original games Pokemon Red, Blue and Green had an element of story to them that may have been simple yes, but people still latched onto nonetheless. In the Pokemon games you play the role of a Trainer, someone who captures and trains creatures called Pokemon to battle one another in contests of strength. During your quest to become the strongest trainer you come across an organization called Team Rocket, they’re basically the Pokemon equivalent to the mafia, who are trying to take over the world, and it becomes your job to stop them.

Next we look at replayability, in Pokemon you go around and build your team of 6 from a roster of now 809 different Pokemon, each capable of using 4 different moves in combat from a pool of 728 total moves, and even though no one Pokemon has access to every move in the pool we still have a whopping total of 390,807,439,998,444 different teams you can go through the game with, and that’s without factoring in movesets! Therefore unless you choose the exact same team of 6, with the exact same set of 4 moves you will practically never have the same experience when playing.

Pokemon - compared to most other TBRPG’s where you have a set cast of characters with set skills or skill trees - is superior in the way of team building and strategy. There are some exceptions such as the Fire Emblem series, which I highly recommend by the way, where you have complete control over each individual characters progression.

Finally we have the aspect of style, for this we’ll be focusing on both artistic style and gameplay because the majority of TBRPG’s play relatively the same and though Pokemon is no exception to that it was the series that defined the TBRPG style.

The cute and awesome characters from the Pokemon series are pop-culture icons in this day and age. In fact there are countless web pages dedicated to replicating, or giving a personal spin on, the different Pokemon designs. Just recently the movie Detective Pikachu was released putting a fresh and more realistic spin on some of the classic characters, such as one of the series mascots, Pikachu the adorable little fuzzball himself. It’s hard not to recognize Pikachu in his many redesigns because the art and style of the Pokemon games are everywhere. Both children and adults worldwide can recognize Pikachu by seeing his zig-zag tail and red cheeks. In the same way we recognize Pikachu’s red cheeks, we recognize characters such as Superman by S the symbol on his chest and Batman from his iconic batarangs. 

Gameplay wise it was Pokemon that popularized the rock,paper,scissors style of combat. fire burns grass, grass beats water, and water puts out fire. Those are only 3 of the total 18 separate types in Pokemon each of which have their own strengths and weaknesses to be accounted for when building a team. It was this mechanic that drew in the crowds of gamers that liked the more technical side of gaming - the min/maxers. And that’s just scratching the surface of the rather complex gameplay of Pokemon. There are also EV’s and IV’s as well as different natures to account for when entering the competitive scene of Pokemon. Speaking of the competitive side of Pokemon did you know that you could win a scholarship for playing Pokemon? It’s true, top placing competitors in the  U.S. national and World championships can win scholarships for playing Pokemon!

In conclusion Pokemon is not only an amazing game series but also a genre defining one that took the world by storm over 20 years ago. Much like the Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling and the cinematic wonders of the recent Marvel’s Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, Pokemon broke standards and paved the way for the rest of its genre to rise in its wake. Pokemon has influenced entire cultures and built communities and if that isn’t a sign of greatness then what is?

[the-pandering-fool]

Conclusion

In the second paragraph of this article author Adam D. Thierer makes the excellent point that even before video games children played games with violent context. The examples he uses are the well known playground games “Cops and Robbers” and “Cowboys and Indians”. Both of these examples in some ways are worse than playing a violent video game. In video games there is a clear line between fantasy and reality, but in those playground games you have children pointing toy guns at one another and shooting other children.

Who's to say that other playground games don’t do similar things? In many places children play fight and if something goes wrong that play fighting could very quickly escalate into real fighting. In fact it’s escalated further than that before. In Denmark during 1994, a 5 year old girl by the name of Silje, was beaten and left to die by three boys on the playground, this is one article that covers the tragic story. The incident was blamed on two children's television shows Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both programs depict violence and in both the hero's beat “enemies” until they stop moving. Because “Power Rangers” is a live action show, that also depicts some everyday scenarios, some children don’t know how to distinguish the fantasy aspects from reality very well.

Now that I've given you a few tools and perspectives on the censorship of video games allow me to share my own. At the end of the day it’s not the government's job to mind your children it’s yours. If you think that your child is responsible and mature enough to handle a rated M game before they’re 17 you can let them play one. But if not don’t go bitching about it to the government, because it’s your fault for not weighing every factor, before purchasing and letting the kids play a game. Just like with buying a car, or a house, or anything for that matter there are things to consider when buying a game. First look at the rating. Based on that make a judgment based upon your child's maturity level and understanding of reality vs. fantasy. And finally even if you don’t understand them, read reviews on the game, watch gameplay videos, and just ask the store clerk if they think a game is appropriate for a child. You have tools readily available to you just use them for crying out loud!

[the-pandering-fool]

Part 4

In this New York Times article author Seth Schiesel goes over the fact that quite frankly it’s a violation of our 1st amendment rights to censor video games. If you’re not in the U.S.A this doesn’t apply to you so please don’t argue opposingly.  For us Americans this would, in fact, be a violation of our right of free expression as it doesn’t actively hurt or hinder anyone thus they don’t violate any laws. Let’s face it, the regulation of video games in such a way would only make a very small (yet vocal) part of the population happy. The vast majority of the population that play games, do just that, they play and enjoy the content for what it’s worth. I won’t say that gamers make up a small percentage of the population because we don’t, gamers are everywhere. Chances are you’re one yourself.

On the note of regulation the ESRB does a fantastic job with its rating system! The ratings have clearly defined criteria for each distinct rating which you can find here. No other rating system is as clear cut or consistent other than the movie rating system.

In 2011 the Supreme Court ruled on the  Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association case. In which the EMA filed a pre-enforcement challenge to a new California law which would apply criminal charges to anyone selling or renting video games depicting violent content to minors.

If you don’t want to slog through the entirety of that I understand. There's a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo and fancy terminology to get through before you can even start to comprehend what it’s saying. So allow me to simplify what went down in the court ruling. The State of California proposed a local law where it would be illegal to sell or rent any game with violent content to a minor. The EMA took this proposition to court stating it would violate the 1st Amendment right of free expression. In the end the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the EMA and the law was unable to pass because of this, therefore nothing changed.

[the-pandering-fool]

Part 3

One of the most common arguments to censor games is that they supposedly cause an increase in violent behavior. So far there has been no conclusive evidence to support that claim. Many studies just like this one which was published just over a year ago in March of 2018 provide evidence that playing violent video games has no effect on one’s behavior at all. You may argue that according to the study it affects short term aggression, and it does, however so does getting randomly slapped in the face by a stranger.

As an avid gamer myself I can attest to the fact when things don’t go the way you want in a single-player game, or when you keep getting killed by the same guy with his stupid sniper from across the fucking map over and over again... you get mad. On the other hand when you’re making progress in a game, or you’re on a sick kill streak from across the map with your sniper, you feel great, both of these are reactionary responses similar to a runner's high or the feeling you get when you have a fight with your S/O. In all of these situations the effects wear off over a short period of time, and then your back to the way you were before it happened.

As comprehensive as the study is there are plenty of arguments to be made against it. The length of the study being one. 8 weeks isn’t really that long in the grand scheme of things, and the study can’t account for variables in the subjects personal lives. Please throw your arguments away for the moment and really think about it for a second. The probability of whatever your argument is affecting the actual data is most likely accounted for. If you wanna know how, go look at how statistical analysis works. I don’t have the time or patience to explain it.

[the-pandering-fool]

Part 2

The formation of the ESRB came about because of the red pixels in Mortal Kombat... and Night Trap...we don’t talk about that. Nowadays there are standards for a game to be published. The problem is not that standards aren’t being upheld, the problem is that parents are willingly exposing their children to violent and/or provocative video games! Think about it, how many times have you heard kids talking about games like Call of Duty or Halo? How many times have you seen a parent buy a game to get their child to stop their whining? How many times have you seen a child turned away because they were too young? Those games are rated M for mature by the ESRB, “Content is generally suitable for ages 17 and up. May contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.” That’s what it takes for a game to have an M rating. So why should developers and publishers be censored because parents aren’t responsible enough to determine that their children maybe shouldn’t be playing GTA5?

It’s not the developers responsibility to make sure that children aren’t being exposed to their more provocative/violent content. A developers job is to make a game that they think people will enjoy and the publishers job is to make sure it gets to the public. In no way is it their job to moderate who consumes the media they produce, that’s your job as the consumer and a parent.

[the-pandering-fool]

Censorship in Games who’s job is it really?

These next few posts are going to be in listicle format.

In today’s society video games are more prevalent than ever, whether you play them to unwind after a long day at work, or to lose yourself in a story, whatever the reason they’re a huge part of today’s world. Like all good things, people just have to ruin them. You might be wondering “How?”. Of the many ways, we’re going to focus on censorship of video games. Here are 5 articles that you can educate yourself with and use to form your own opinions.

To start, let’s read Pocket Gamers article on the brief history of censorship in video games. See this all started back in 1976, and just look at those graphics! How could that need to be censored? Well that’s based on perception, nowadays looking at those pixel art graphics- with its blocky square people with square wheeled cars, we wonder how is that bad? But back in 1976 those were cutting edge graphics and in the wild imaginations of parents they saw the basic art as vividly as if a man was hit by a car right in front of them. The red pixels were like a tomato on a windshield.  When you think about it like that it kinda makes sense doesn't it? And let’s really think about it for a second. If you were to actually see someone get hit by a car and explode into pieces how would you react. Take a second, close your eyes, and imagine it. I’m not going anywhere, so take your time.

Now that you’re back how did you react to the vision of someone exploding in front of you? It was probably pretty weird right? That's because in order for someone to explode on impact with a car that car has to be going ridiculously fast, I’m talking breaking the sound barrier fast, and chances are you’ve never seen that happen. Our brains have a very hard time imagining things we’ve never experienced or seen for ourselves (so if  you were able to imagine someone exploding good on you). Our brains are very good at exaggerating things though. The point I’m making here is that people jump to conclusions before actually thinking things through more often than not.