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.
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. They were even in the process of explaining why some players might do it, but just left out the important parts.
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.
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.
Has this changed recently? I started playing at launch, and while it was a lot of fun and I had predominantly positive experiences, after a couple of weeks I quit because it devolved into little more than griefing. I don’t mind it getting a little sweaty here and there but I don’t have time for nonstop edgelords going lord of the flies in front of their 3 twitch viewers.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m always on the lookout for non-violent low-stress games. I do like exploration. Games like A Short Hike are few and far between.
I thought Death Stranding was supposed to be less-stressful but I’m quite near the start and so far I’ve got to worry about items degrading, inventory management and enemies. I was just looking for more of a peaceful walking simulator game. I wish more games had a non-combat option, or maybe a “Jesus take the wheel” mode for the stressful bits that turns it into more of an interactive cutscene.
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.
I don't think there's any purpose behind it, most like early on, game with shooting were just simpler to develop, especially with regards to limited processing power and storage. For example I remember an extract from a review on the original Doom, saying that it would be much better if they were able to talk to the monsters; but at the time, a talking game would have been nearly impossible to make, especially to the same level of polish as the original Doom.
And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...
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.
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks that must have almost no real exposure to video games. The diversity of gaming experiences is huge, and shooters represent only a small fraction of that.
Games of tag where you are “out” when hit, optionally with a mechanism for being revived are a staple game for young kids around here. Video games with shooting just seems like a logical extension of that into the virtual domain and with ranged “tag” of that.
Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.
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.
I think it’s more because point-and-click is suited to shooters. Look at thing you want to shoot, click on it. A simple premise that you can layer stuff onto to make a good game.
> "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.
I just don't see a usual team behind a violent movie or game having a though process of "how can we make people want to go to war more". My theory is sort of the opposite - people enjoy such media because it's violence without hurting anyone in the real world, a fantasy.
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.
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.
It's pointing and clicking. It's just one of the simplest things a game can make a player do. It's intuitive what sound roughly it should make and what visual effect to show up.
It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Of all the recent video games, Arc raiders has been just good fun to watch.
Cohh Carnage’s Arc Raider streams and saw many genuinely nice interactions, especially on rubber duck runs.
Interestingly, Solo Arc Raiders has a very different vibe than team Arc Raiders. In the few group based streams I watched, players shot each other by default. In solo it was less competitive.
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
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.
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.
[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
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.
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.
So this is kind of something that has not been disclosed that makes TFA... less of a story.
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.
I thought Death Stranding was supposed to be less-stressful but I’m quite near the start and so far I’ve got to worry about items degrading, inventory management and enemies. I was just looking for more of a peaceful walking simulator game. I wish more games had a non-combat option, or maybe a “Jesus take the wheel” mode for the stressful bits that turns it into more of an interactive cutscene.
Does this serve any purpose?
Maybe it makes joining the military not too unappealing for teenagers.
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.
And then it's a feedback loop: video games get the reputation of being violent (perhaps undeservedly so, like Myst was outselling the original Doom, IIRC, but violent games made for bigger headline in mainstream media) => only people interested in that buy them => violent games are the best-selling => games...
1. Run
2. Think
3. Shoot
4. Live
Besides shooters there are many puzzle games as well.
With that logic you could also dumb down chess to killing, because that's the core mechanic.
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.
But I do mind shooting human being. I wish we would be more creative on that front.
Edit: but I know you mean shooting aliens or something similar.
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.
It's as if it was weird that most dancing has a lot of putting one foot in front of the other.
Back when games were mostly 2D, a lot of action games got consolidated into platformers. Shooters just seem to be the equivalent genre in 3D.
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)
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.
It was kinda weird considering the game type.
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.
Cohh Carnage’s Arc Raider streams and saw many genuinely nice interactions, especially on rubber duck runs.
Interestingly, Solo Arc Raiders has a very different vibe than team Arc Raiders. In the few group based streams I watched, players shot each other by default. In solo it was less competitive.
Next level, you medic and heal the hoovies. Winning every round automatically by not fighting.
There are so many other ways to chat and make friends without breaking tem balance.