giovedì 15 settembre 2011

Why I Like Games



First things first, i'm a geek. I have no qualms about it. I have no pride about it either. Anyone chooses their interests and, honestly, i think the whismsical hyper-enthusiasm that some geeks have is as creepy as the social awkwardness of nerds or the apathetic indifference of anyone else.

It's great to have passions, of any kind but it doesnt necessarily makes you better, smarter or more interesting than others. The effect is, maybve, reversed: you are a person with a brain, life is NEVER interesting, so you make it more amazing by keeping yourself fascinated about everything and by keeping enthusiasm and thirst for new things. Yet if you're a soulless douche, there's nothing in this world that will make you a good person. You might be a party animal and spend all your money in that, be a sex machine that invests all his time into getting new lovers, a hardcore reader or a sports fan. You will still be a mediocre person and all your passions will always leave you incomplete and empty. But if you're smart and interesting, you'll find the beauty in anything in the world.


This is why i find so much magic in aspects of fictional things. I have an overactive immaginations and i think that reality is generally grey and dire. Bill Burr said once that "sports are something you can connect with, cause they're real". Maybe. But i find anything that involves creativity and works on the immagination, much more charming. Besides music, which is a drug of its wown that i think everyone must have in their lives, unless they're walking corpses, all forms of fiction are where the wizardy is at.


Think of "Deus Ex - Human Revolution". I know, i know, its a videogame and the last videogame you played was Pong. Shut the fuck up.

The game, following the footsteps of its genre bending predecessor, is basically set in a cyberpunk world, but what makes it special is that it allows you to face any obstacle or situation in literally any way you choose to and adapts to that. And to obtain that, it creates tiny magnificient moments of natural, unscripted comedy.


Example (again, dont be close minded douches and try to follow):


My character is trying to steal some fundamental information in a hevaily guarded room. So far i made him act like a silent, sneaky spy with powerful hacking abilities. No bullets, no violence, i made him suave, silent and ghost like.


While hacking the computer, i get distracted and a guard enters and sees me. I panic and punch him out. I should hide his body, that might get me in trouble but i need to get what i came in for and quick. I do but, obviously, another guard sees the body from distance. I hide. The guy comes closer, sees his buddy there, freaks out and, cursing, starts looking for me. At some point i realize, ill never get out of there without a fight, so i shoot him. Seems i'm free to go now. AT that point a giant security robot, armed with machine guns enters the room.


Fuck.


I hide again. If the thing sees me.....


The bot sees the corpses. He doesnt seem shocked. He looks around. Peers like a military Wall-E around the corners. Then shrugs and goes away.


After a while i'll pass him and he will ignore me. That happens in the game. Guards will be nervous and panicky, irritable and trigger happy. Bots will shoot you if they see you but most of the time they will enter a room full of human corpses and mostly give you a look that says "Well. If you clean up and dont make noise, ill just go my way. I dont really care about those silly humans".


I know, i am proibably overthinking this, but it happens so frequently its just hilarious. Hey stop staring. Fuck off.


1 commento:

  1. I read the biography about the mathematician John Nash - the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind and I found his work in game theory utterly fascinating. Not merely because of the intellectual exercise that was involved in trying to make some sort of sense of it but the imagination which Nash was blessed with in order to codify those theories into workable tennents.

    You see the legacy of Nash's work in just about any gaming incarnation. Even in today's high end PC and Console games where, for the most part, imagination is the driver for a complex set of theorems that not only happen but they happen because we interact with them.

    This is just a long winded way of saying, I fucking love gaming too man...

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