Also, men being redundant? Seriously? Where is this happening? Last time I checked, the vast majority of powerful people in the world are still men, as they have been for millenia. I also don’t get how being gentle and sensitive undermines a person’s role as a provider and a protector, particularly since I know many people, both male or female, who are all of the above. Can’t we all provide for and protect one other?

And, well, I know office jobs can often suck and drain the life out of people, but I’m not sure being more violent is going to do anything but relieve a little stress in the short term. Why not just quit your job and do something you love? Works for a lot of people.

though, unlike you, i don’t mind killing in games, in fact i prefer killing. take diablo 2 for instance. to me, the best game i’ve played. its killing from start to finish. but the perfect game imo. and i believe it will be hard to top. its not intended as one of these “art games”, but too me, if you want to start calling games art, then diablo 2 must surely be the prime example. for one thing, it has brilliant gameplay (the most important thing of a game). in fact, the gameplay is so good and addictive, the game still has an active community today, what 8 years on. when it comes down to it, its not the mature emotionly driven story that makes most people go back to the game, or how mature its content are, NO, but the amount of fun they have playing. theres the good vs evil, the faceless hero standing up against impossible odds. look at the druid and the paladin, these arent guys built like houses, no, they look like normal human beings. something which games like resident evil also use. the more normal and faceless the hero, the more you identify and take the role of the hero. i have never lived myself more into a game before than diablo 2. the realism and detailed world just makes everything a bit more gritty and identifiable, more “real”. no out of proportion shoulder pads or gigantic swords. its just this dark world hellish world with little hope. man, i can go on and on. but theres a reason a game like this is so popular. the fun you can have with trying different builds, that eternal quest for the best legendary item that you will probably never find.

in a world where man has become almost redundant, where females want them to be be this gentle sensitive guy where their roles as provider and protector have all but disappeared, dont you think that games is one of the last places they can turn to to get in touch with their primal selves. its like the girl in fight club said. the guys are hitting each other just to feel something again, to feel alive again, because todays society with their office jobs and no real use, are sucking the life out of men.

ive seen people play crysis (wow!). how can games become more mature than that? its simply amazing. who are making these games for adolescent boys?
older titles like icewind dale (i just loved the way the weather and the environment, which was beautiful, played such a large part of the story, and how the story was told, it was one of the best experiences ive ever had playing a game), broken sword 1+2, american mcgee’s alice, myst series (the opening of myst 4 still makes me feel like im going back home, simply fantastic), the fun of playing doom (the game we were not supose to play).

i dont like people throwing all these new games into the same category and saying “games aren’t innovative anymore, or are meant for adoscelent boys”. quite frankly, thats just rubbish. some of the games today are doing amazing stuff. there are so many john blows and yathzees of the world just out to tell us “games can be so much more bla bla”. pretending to be better than games are. but then they end up copying from the very games they criticize. who are these people who still think games are meant for children? most children have grown up now, and the average gamer is much older than they used to be, and will continue to grow older. i don’t know many children, but im sure they play games. though, me and my friends are adults, and we play games, as im sure many of the teenagers of the 80′s and 90′s kids are still playing games today. who are smirking at my favourite pastime? the only people ive really experienced smirking at games are females, and only in certain cases. why? because, they don’t like they’re husband playing games, and not spending time with them. the very same females have admitted to having enjoyed one game or another somewhere in their life, be it mario, or some other game.

i absolutely love games for what they are. ive loved so many games over the years, and being told that somehow these games could have so much more, that they havent reached their potential, it just doesn’t work for me, imo opinion.

in my experience, its seems a large part of people grew up doing nothing BUT playing games (you can spot them rather easily on forums), and it now so bored with every title out there, that they want something new, and the gaming industry just isn’t giving them what they want. and i can understand that. so many on forums are destroying games left and right, not happy with anything. i think, games, like anything else in life should done in moderation. balance is important. what is cliche to someone might not be cliche to someone else. its not my fault you’ve played every game on the face of the planet, and now criticise my game for being too much like everything else. how long will this new wonderful innovative mature game keep you happy until you scream for something new again?

it seems to me, that a lot of people are not having fun anymore playing games, simply because they have played to many of them.

As for “this is why this hallway or enemy is here” statement, that would only apply to certain types of games. I look at a game like Tetris and I have to wonder why someone wouldn’t consider that a work of art. It’s absolute pure design, and the only way to truly appreciate it is to play it. You can watch someone play it, but you wouldn’t feel what they feel, their anxiety or their satisfaction. It doesn’t tell a story, it doesn’t have an ending, you can’t really compare it to a poem or a song or a movie or a book or a painting.

I think it’s a mistake to see “art” as a descriptor of quality. I think movement games and adventure games and RPGs and metaludes are art, and always have been. There’s lots of room for personal expression in them, which I think is probably the only criterion that matters. But they’re very rarely good art. People generally think if you say “This is art!”, it means it’s good. Not so. If a composer composes particularly bad music, is that not art? Is a kid’s finger painting not art? Anything created in a form of art is art, by definition. So if you’re saying certain kinds of game have the potential to be art (and wouldn’t that mean it’s an art form?), then you should say that the games of those types are art already- bad art.

To be clear: I think what I have just said is a perfectly legitimate argument which should not be discredited out of hand. It is not, however, my position. As I said, I was playing devil’s advocate. For my part, I think the argument is silly from many angles. It doesn’t matter whether a game is art, it doesn’t matter whether people recognize that a game is art, art is not inherently superior to entertainment, art is a fuzzy and possibly meaningless concept, and making a game for the express purpose of it being art is a waste of time and thought. What matters is only whether the game, whatever it is, is good. How the public will see it is the concern of marketers, not gamists.

And what emotions does a game play with? Most often it’s just one or two emotions, repeated over and over. You can very rarely take a scene and say “Here’s what this scene is about, here’s the new emotion it’s bringing in.”. It’s just a continuation of the same activity you’ve been doing before. So how is it art?