Violent gamers are bad gamers

I’ve played a lot of games, and I notice various patterns when playing with people. It should be obvious that people have a lot of different levels of competence, and there are different levels of maturity  as well.

I’ve noticed a connection for years: the best players are the more mature players. The people who are really good at video games tend to be more mature, and it only makes sense to me, since you need a lot of discipline to be good at a game.

What I never did, however, was make the connection. We talked about violent video games in class, and I have spent years defending violent video games. I never made the connection.

Someone else did. A study in Sweden suggests that the cause and effect of video games and violence is not just incorrect, but based on a hypothetical situation that doesn’t exist outside of the hypothetical. It turns out that being more mature and working with other people is a huge help with these games, and the people who play those games the most need a lot of maturity and good cooperation skills.

So not only is the link between violence and video games questioned, but the entire framework of that research is now under question. Can we put this entire issue to bed soon?

Use Crowbar, Ace Test

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9370-Use-Crowbar-Ace-Test

Interesting article about the connection between gaming skill and academic skill. I didn’t take the SAT, but the ACT is very similar in its huge emphasis on reasoning skill, but I don’t think I made the connection to video games. Not this directly, at least.

Fallout 3 and Regret

(This is also posted at my personal blog here.)

Early on in Fallout 3, you escape Vault 101, essentially a massive bomb shelter, where you have spent the first nineteen years of your character’s life. Your quest to find your father, who also escaped, leads you to the town of Megaton, a small town built around an undetonated atomic bomb. While trying to find information about your father, you run into Mr. Burke, who offers you a rather large sum of money and a suite in Tenpenny Tower, a penthouse that somehow survived nuclear Armageddon. In exchange, he wants you to detonate the atomic bomb in the center of town.

I felt some attachment to the town, so even though I took the detonator, I disarmed the bomb and immediately went to the sheriff, Lucas Simms, and told him about Burke’s offer. I followed the sheriff as he confronted Burke, who reached for his gun. Before he could pull the trigger, I shot and killed Burke, saving Simms. As thanks for disarming the bomb and killing Burke, he gave me ownership of a house in Megaton.

Fast forward about 25 hours of play time, during which an empty Megaton was my hom., I had taken a turn towards “evil”. At this point, all that mattered to me was my own gains – I picked pockets, I broke into houses and stole everything that I could get my hands on. I did all of this through stealth, almost never being noticed by the inhabitants even if I stole something off their nightstand while they slept. If I failed at being stealthy, I killed the person to cover my tracks. As part of my spree of theft, I broke into the Megaton armory.

I found myself face to face with Deputy Steel, a robot whose job was to protect the armory. I couldn’t simply take damage, so I attacked and destroyed him, looting the armory. As I left, the entire town attacked me. I couldn’t simply run because they did too much damage, so I shot my way out, killing most of the town. Getting high on the amount of loot I gained, I proceeded to kill every single resident and loot their bodies. No one was left alive, and I sold all of their possessions.

Fast forward another 10 hours of play time, and the main quest in the game was over. I was forced to make a decision: I could activate the water purifier, finally giving people clean, non-irradiated water, or poison it. I could not doom all those people, so I didn’t use the poison I told someone that I would use on the purifier (as you can tell, I don’t have any problems with lying to people who I consider enemies). I’m wandering in the world after my actions have changed everything in the wasteland, and I’m back in my home in Megaton. As I walk outside to begin traveling, I think about the town. Everyone is dead. And not only are they dead, I killed them in a combination of greed and adrenaline rush. I keep thinking that I wish that everyone was back in the town.

Sure, I could just reload an old save, but I’ve accomplished so much in the intervening time that I don’t think I could go back. It would not only cause me to lose progress in the game, but it would also feel like I’m invalidating my character and my experience with the game. To go back now would be cheating, causing my actions to have no meaning, taking away one of Fallout 3’s greatest strengths. I’ve gone through a character arc in the course of the game, and taking that away would be to give my character no identity. In my game, The Lone Wanderer (official name for your character) was a man who was corrupted by greed, causing him to kill the people he once protected, until he realized how much harm he had done.

The truly fascinating thing was that, even though I used third person up there, all of these things didn’t just happen to my character – they also happened to me. I felt regret for having betrayed my self-anointed responsibility for the people of Megaton, which has caused me to have a lot of difficulty with playing the game further. No matter what else I do in the game, I can’t bring back the people – not characters, people – that I killed. All that I’ve learned about identity in video games was easy for me to understand – I’ve already lived it. I’ve felt just how much events in a game can affect you, and how your character in the game is not only affected by you, but how that character can also affect you.

That leads to where I am with the game right now. I’ve run into a dead end – The Lone Wanderer’s first story is done – so I have started the game again from the beginning, trying to create a new story, seeing if I can live as another character in the same world. I’ve been distracted by other games, but another part of me thinks that I can’t really stand to part with my first character in that game, even though his story is mostly over.

Starcraft in learning and research

These are slightly old, but I found these articles again recently:

University of Florida has had a business management class for the last few years that uses Starcraft to teach business management skills.

Starcraft 2 may pass chess as the most analyzed game used to try and understand human cognition.

I don’t play Starcraft myself (I prefer turn-based to real-time strategy for the most part), but I have played enough Starcraft to have a basic idea of the complexity of the game. The fact that it not only can be used to understand very large, complicated systems, but also can help study any and all cognitive processes just shows that video games have nearly unlimited learning potential.

Extra Credits

James Portnow and Daniel Floyd, the team behind the YouTube video we were required to watch for class, have an ongoing web series about video games called Extra Credits. They mostly talk about how video games should be taken seriously by thinking deeply about what’s in the games and what they mean, but they have some episodes more relevant to this class.

Main page for the series.

Relevant Episodes:

Tutorials 101: about how to do game tutorials properly.

Tangential Learning: a newer version of the episode that we watched already — the biggest difference is the art has been redone and some scripting has been changed

Gamification and Gamifying Education: outlines some principles that leads to something very similar to the structure of this class. In fact, at first I thought that this class was designed like this because of these videos.

These are just a few that are immediately relevant to the class. If and when I find more that are relevant as the year goes on, I’ll post about them here.