Wait, why are we fighting again?

[Icarus Roun]

So, I was one of those kids in the 90s that was introduced to video games as a real thing, not just pong or space invaders and the like.

One of the first games I started with was C&C Red Alert. Then I was introduced to stuff like Lords of the realm 2 and Starcraft. Eventually I had an N64 and played golden eye and starfox and all those great games.

The big deal for me was when xbox came around and I discovered Halo, Halo was my first dual joystick game, that was where I first learned the concept of movement stick and visual stick, which over arched into everything we have today.

My two all time favorites hands down were Halo and Elder Scrolls. Then there was stuff like Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Chrome Hounds. Each of these games have their obvious reasons why, with how distinct each of them are.


Now the point for why we are here...

I have spent my whole life for the last twenty years where the most popular games were violent and warfare in some nature. Literally almost every game had some kind of weapon in your hand the vast majority of the time.

Growing up this was really exciting, I loved war movies and I still enjoy Braveheart all these years later.

But now, today, I ask the simple question, why are we fighting?

I have two main realms of interest in my life at this point. Medieval Life and Space Age Life. Its a duality that I jump back and forth from depending on the day or week.

Im not saying that I am becoming a pacifist, god forbid... But I look at trailers for new games now and all I see is how the game fights. Im bored... I look at stuff like Vikings, Game of Thrones, The Expanse, Firefly/Serenity, and what I see is regular people in a regular world just trying to live their lives. Then, they find themselves in a conflict that cant be escaped, they must either fight or their worlds come to an end. That has been reality for thousands of years.

I want to explore these two realms first as just a person in them. See the world for what it is. Then encounter conflicts that I may or may not have any stake in, and be able to have a peaceful existence if realistically possible.

Dont get me wrong, I do love conquest, raiding and looting, going out to make my name and fortune... Thats really damn fun... But that isnt all we have in life.

I look at games like Crowfall coming out. Its a total sandbox player driven everything. No scripted quests or crap just there to occupy your time. But a world designed for people to be dropped into an environment together to tell their own stories with each other.

Thats amazing... But still the game is centered around PVP I want a reason to fight, and a realistic shake and not having to fight when there is another way to handle things.

I forced myself to finish 'The 100' and god that show was stupid... Bad science, irrational plot development, and 'on the ground' level politics that make no sense to me what-so-ever. There was a vast array of options where peace could have been made and sustained, but the writers deliberately took a goose shit all over everything because they are haters setting everything up for the sole purpose of Jasper making his speech that humans are bad and validating the sentiment... Human hating, LIfe hating, garbage, that in an honest world should never have been put on the screen.

Im tired of bad stories with forced political people-hating garbage.

I loved the expanse, one of my favorite shows of all time... Honest, sincere, real world people with real world problems and situations. Real desperation to find some way to solve our problems and make the world a better place for our people... I ate that up, and would love to play a game in that world...

So with all of this, I go back to the point.

Why are we always fighting?

Are there any games like this out there?

The ones that I know of. Banished, Patrician 3. Caesar 3, I tend to see a lot more of these kinds of games in the past. Like new game developers just dont understand what everything is about.

The thing about the majority of people, is that they are stupid. Giving people what they want is stupid, trying to teach people what they really should want and allowing them to make an intelligent informed decision is much better. Popularity is essentially stupidity... Increasing the number of morons in a room does not raise the IQ of the room.

Guess at this point im starting to rant so ill quit... xD

Basically said what I have to say, hope for some suggestions on any hidden gems out there in the world, and maybe some good discussion to come out of this. Let me know what you think

 

[zink77]

Game companies are conservative and games are expensive to produce, so they go with lowest common denominator. The time for experimentation was the 80's through to the late 90's, about 2000 games became too big and expensive to experiment and games settled into genres.

If you look at early NES games there's a lot of experimentation that would horrify most game developers and publishers today.

Also after 2000 when games hit the masses the big shift was towards games as pseudo movies with a side bit of game mechanics. Basically publishers and game devs figured out they could expand the game market making basically movies people played a role in.

The reality is since many new game developers never grew up in the 80's and 90's, oldsters are getting pushed out. For instance I watched as games were literally stolen out from under us from around 2006 onwards as the rise of steam and always online drm and mmo's created a generation of kids/adults that are ok with not owning the games they are buying which lead to publishers having absolute control over the software. It's been a downhill slide into idiocracy territory... Now that games have hit the masses and gambling and exploitive game mechanics from mobile gaming have infested normal gaming because now the masses are online, microtransactions and chopping up games into little chunks is what is on publishers minds.

Making expensive single player games or niche games don't seem as profitable if you consider this chart. That means mobile is almost bigger than PC and Console game revenues combined because of stupid microtransactions and gambling. That small idiot group of people gambling and spending huge amounts of money is now encouraging game devs to not make traditional games.

Old games I'd recommend:

Alpha centauri (gog) - https://www.gog.com/game/sid_meiers_alpha_centauri

Newer games:

Stardew valley https://store.steampowered.com/app/413150/Stardew_Valley/

Recetear an item shops tale -- https://store.steampowered.com/app/70400/Recettear_An_Item_Shops_Tale/

 

[ImpulsE69]

Eh I know that if you just look at the COD's of the world it may seem that way, but there are still amazing games coming out every year. You have to look past the marketing. The more money a company spent on marketing the worse it typically is. I haven't played a CoD since 4. Tons of people complain about CoD, yet continue to buy them.

As for fighting, well...if you don't have some sort of conflict there's not much to say. It can't always be "I lost my keys". That being said, it's not that hard to find what you are looking for. They are all over Steam. The problem is they tend to be short, and more like walking simulators.

 

[Craig234]

I think fighting is far too 'normal' in gaming, simply because it's an easy thing to make a game about, and it does affect how people think of violence; if someone wants to disagree, all they need to do is show me how they have taken action against the wrong war in Yemen instead of accepting it because 'ya people are killing each other who cares whatever'.

But there are a lot of games not that way.

Talos Principle and Stanley Parable are just a couple that quickly come to mind as great games.

 

[Stg-Flame]

I constantly see people requesting a game where you're not the superhero or the one-man army, but instead you're just a bystander trying to live your life while everything unfolds outside. This War of Mine comes close to that given you're just trying to survive in a warzone and you have to make choices regarding whether or not to steal from people or let them be and fend for yourself. There's other great games that don't have any fighting/conflict (Portal for example), but the main attraction is conflict. There's walking simulators out there. There's pure puzzle games out there. There's exploration games out there. There's settlement building games out there. There's options, but the game you're looking for hasn't been made (yet).

There is an option for you in the meantime and that's co-op. A friend and I did a co-op run through Terraria but he loved building massive elaborate cities and I just loved exploring. He'd stay at the base and build everything while I went down and explored. When I'd make a trip back, I'd offload everything I had found and he'd continue to build. Often times he'd come down to help me mine certain rocks/ores if he needed a bunch but for the vast majority of the game, he'd stay and build while I did all the exploring and killing. When it came time for events, bosses, and invasions, he had a full weapon loadout and joined in. It was actually a lot of fun. I also had a similar experience with a group I used to play 7 Days to Die and Ark with. Two or three people would stay and build while the rest of us went out foraging for whatever we could find. Might be something to think about to tide you over.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

People love conflict and struggle, narratives without them are usually boring and the easiest type of conflict to portray in media is physical conflict. There's some good reasons behind this that are deeply tied into our biology, that's something I've come to learn a lot about recently after watching a lot of Jordan Petersons psychology lectures, his teachings out of the UofT are free on youtube. We have all sorts of mechanisms that make us want to step into the unknown, into the realm of chaos an uncertainty and explore there and defeat whatever lurks there and bring back the treasure, it's what is known as an archetypal story, an example is slaying the dragon and bringing back the gold. So if you're interested in the 'why' for all that, I'd advise watching his lectures.

As for games with no fighting, there's loads. Exploration games, management games, Sim games, stealth games, story driven games/experiences, racing, etc. The main problem is that most of what you see advertised are the AAA games with $100M+ budgets typically half go on advertising and they're all about conflict to draw in the kinda 15 year old+ male crowd who are the target audience of these studios, it's easy money. Most of the non violent games are by smaller studios who can't advertise like that, they rely on world of mouth largely, so I'd advise changing the way you find and learn about games, stay away from the big budget advertising stuff, in fact I'd avoid the AAA games segment for the most part because while they have the big explosions and effects, they often lack in gameplay. The indie market is where all the innovation happens, many of those games are on kickstarter or other crowd funded platforms, or they go through early access trials on steam.

One great way to find these games is find an independent reviewer whose opinions align with your own and follow what they review and recommend, for me that's a youtube channel called WorthABuy run by a guy called Mack, he recently reviewed an early access game called Breathedge which he strongly recommended and I bought and thoroughly enjoyed, no combat at all, it's kinda like subnautica in space.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I would argue that we're actually in a new golden age for Indie games and experimental games thanks to kickstarter, green light and other indie game initiatives.

Also, thanks to a large number of relatively user friendly and cheap (or free) game engines with fairly modern feature sets, indie games don't always have to look like an indie game nowadays either.

Some of the most popular modern indie games, like Kerbal Space Program, Bridge Simulator, and of course Minecraft, have modes or base games that have no "conflict" or combat at all.

 

[Icarus Roun]

Im NOT saying that I want to be without conflict or violence... Im saying that I need a reason to believe in what were doing... I see games like CoD how it is an arbitrary war situation. Invasion! Terrorism! The same dull point we have seen over and over again.

I want to know, how did we get here? What is this war really about? What are we actually trying to accomplish? This cant simply be, we dont like them! they have stuff that we want! Because if you have seen a hundred car chases you tend to get bored to the point where you want to skip over them to actually see some flippin dialogue...

Heres my thing, I am working on a novel concept that takes the age old light vs dark, good vs evil, conflict on the cosmic level. Essentially God and the Devil... But where this story takes place is at a human terrestrial level in a sci fi setting. The crux of what I want to right is not only that we have war and violence in our world because there is good and evil. But to impress upon how EVERYTHING is effected by this outer, greater, conflict.

What it means to be human, what it means to love, the expression, and purpose of civilization... All the way down to why things like death and destruction even exist in our universe.

There are tons of dualities to our existence, my project my be too ambitious, I may never fully accomplish what I set out to do. But what I want is to create something so engaging that it makes people think about their own lives and have a positive impact on their minds.

I watched The Expanse through that lense. I actually cried almost every time I saw the intro and heard the music. To me it was a microcosm of the human condition. Different time, different place, same problems, which isnt necessarily a bad thing.

The flaws and faults that make use human are unique, I for one believe that this whole universe is nothing more than a playground for the developing of character consciousness. We are beings of light, stuck in a clay jar, we are here to suffer and struggle and endure to achieve something we have not done before. It isnt about self empowerment, its about learning to deal with difficulty.

The hardest thing for any human being to do, is to be wronged, seriously, totally, then to be able to turn around and say, I forgive you... The demand for justice is the order of the day, but how strong are you if you have the ability to take revenge and choose not to?


I know, I went down a serious effing rabbit hole...

But the point of it all is, were not just here to fight because we can, we learn nothing... The thing that makes me really sad about all of this is that literally everything we see now revolves around money. I want to write a whole series of fiction novels, I have about a dozen good narratives laid out trying to make them fix in a single universe. I want to do this for passion. I dont care if I ever make money, I just want to get peoples attention and show them something they have never seen before.

What we have in gaming is player choice. The player is the hero, the player is the most important thing in the whole universe. What if we were thrust into something that we didnt necessarily want? What if we had to deal with things totally outside of our control?

What if we suddenly had a Ready Player One situation where someone is telling you no, and you actually have to fight, not play guns shooting at each other, but if you cant find a solution to the problem, then you are locked out of having what you want, and its over... What if the game conflict was serious?

Instead we have the exact opposite. Anything that is mildly competitive has to be watered down to accommodate peoples preference. And again, people are too stupid to know what they want.

We have mock violence and mock conflict. If someone sits around all day and plays these, peanut gallery games, with no consequences for losing, no reward for winning, and the only thing they can do is sit around and feel good about themselves, is this really conflict? Or is this just masturbation?

Its easy to say that people love conflict, but do you realize how delusional that is? Its like roman nobility talking about how glorious the gladiator fights are when they themselves will never set foot upon the sand... The best example I can think of is the first Hunger Games, remember when they were preparing for the event and they have all the fan fair? Haymitch sees the little boy with the toy sword chasing his sister like he is going to kill her. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT WE HAVE! We have a whole society of people who have never once experienced real conflict in their lives. People who are so delusional that the compulsion to kill someone is a casual act of cheap entertainment. Walking away with nothing more than their own insanity...

The only time we can honestly look at conflict and struggle in video games as something meaningful is if you have something to lose.

Mass Effect was one of those things that struck every cord. I had true belief going in, I took the developers at their word that choice really mattered. Sadly at the end I saw that very little choice actually mattered on the big picture. But it did matter in the little things. With each sequel the choices you made before came back to either please you or haunt you. The conflict wasnt the highlight of the game for me, it was the prospect that I could be getting into something that is unwinnable, that I could have made a choice, even early on, that doomed man kind... By the third game I was actually worried, I had a degree of anxiety about what I was doing. I felt my own conscience fraying about what I was doing and what I was feeling. Sadly, I came to realize that the ending was fixed, and that nothing I could have done would have changed the outcome. No working things out with the Illusive Man, no subverting the three token choices at the end. No winning the war with outright military genious, hell, the millitary might counter didnt even make sense with a lot of the assets you could obtain.

The bottom line, I learned something from that game. I was presented with something outside of my control, trying to find a solution, learning about my own moral condition, reevaluating my intellectual position. There are some deem emotional things that happened in my own mind that I still feel years later after going through all that, even now thinking about some things that I regret.

But hey, lets all just shoot each other because this side is blue and that side is red.....

On a more positive note... I look forward to a few things. I see Crowfall, Chronicles of Elyria, both of these are player driven and honestly and sincerely open world games. I would hope that more unfolds from games like these then just fighting because we can. I would hope for real world natural organic role play, just the sincerity that we are all people in this sandbox trying to tell our own stories with no one holding our hands through it.

In simplest terms I suppose, the thing that really matters is conscience. Do people ever ask themselves wither they are right or wrong. What side of history are we on? Thats the fundamental problem with video games.

In the end nothing we do really matters. The only thing that does is how we treated each other in these games and how that might play out in the cosmic weave...

 

[Craig234]

Icarus, it seems you have a bit to learn, that the rule for wars is that they are about some powerful interests who think they'll gain by the war, even if that's just more power, and that others suffer the cost of the war and are given myths about glory and patriotism and other things to justify the war and motivate them. That's mostly how it works. It's ugly. It's mostly criminal.

And by the time wars start, most people don't have a lot of luxury to ask about right and wrong. It's more kill or be killed.

Try a book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", for some commentary on the societal attitudes about war.

 

[Craig234]

You mentioned Mass Effect and moral issues. The most striking 'moral choice' I remember, the game forced on you by taking two similar, likable crew members, putting them in separate battles, and creating a situation telling you you could help and save only one of them and the other would be killed. That felt forced and cheap to me.

A game that did better than most - where most strip 'morals' and make it about 'fun and winning' - about moral issues was one designed by people who had been through war as civilians and wanted to help people better understand the experience some in "This War of Mine". That's a pretty haunting game.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Icarus, it sounds like you don't like COD 53 and Battlefield 0.75 and every other derivative wargame out there. You want a fantasy world where the deliniation of good and evil are clear and understandable, and maybe tried to do something different than "kill the other team by hitting them with your rock until they stop moving".

That's fine, I find COD clones boring as heck from a thematic perspective and I love when games give me a method for talking my way out of a situation or making the reasoning behind hitting something with the rock very unambigous.

Also, The Expanse is a fantastic TV show, I can't wait till S4 debuts on Prime...

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I can relate to the desensitization, when you say you've seen a car chase 100 times it's no longer really exciting, like with any other kind of stimulus we need more, bigger, better to give us the same emotional impact, it's like with drug users that 'chase the dragon', they want to feel the same high they felt the first time they did the drug but they'll never get that again because as your body gets used to the stimulus you get less and less reward and so you need an ever bigger stimulus until you kinda top out, with drug users they literally overdose. We're in an era where there's so much media being produced that you can't even consume it all, we're saturated with stories. And to speed up this process capitalism is rewarding the people who produce the media that has the most emotional impact and so everything is hyper stimulus which desensitizes people faster.

Part of good story telling is making the characters likeable and relatable, if you form a connection with that character then you begin to care for them and whatever happens to them has a larger emotional impact on you. You're starting to see this more and more with TV because you can follow the same characters through many hours of screen time, often 100's, it's why we're starting to see story telling that builds these characters up over many hours and then kills them off, that's the core story telling mechanic of shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. I'm not sure if that's clever or a kinda cheap trick.

People like novelty, they like to see things they haven't seen before, it's partly why Scifi and things set in history are so appealing to us, because they're completely different than our day to day experience. As you see more and more car chases the novelty wears off and you're left looking for more, that can be partly found in the story. Obviously games have one thing that TV, movies and books don't have, which is the ability to interact with the medium and because of that you can build a game that basically has no story, it's just enjoyable for other reasons, and in many games they do have story/narrative but it's nothing more than a vehicle to deliver other game elements, like in your typical CoD and Battlefield games. So games are always going to be a medium open to bad storytelling it's kinda inherent in the medium itself, story isn't strictly necessary.

Some games do have good narratives and story though, you just have to go and find them, Telltale do quite a good job of being mostly an interactive story, I think Ken Levine does a great job with narrative, he made the bioshock games and heavily influenced by Ayn Rand. He has some interesting ideas on narrative and did a talk on 'narrative lego' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p40p0AVUH70 which makes me wonder what he might have in store for us in his next game.

 

[BSim500]

I have spent my whole life for the last twenty years where the most popular games were violent and warfare in some nature. Literally almost every game had some kind of weapon in your hand the vast majority of the time. Growing up this was really exciting, I loved war movies and I still enjoy Braveheart all these years later. But now, today, I ask the simple question, why are we fighting? I want to explore these two realms first as just a person in them. See the world for what it is. Then encounter conflicts that I may or may not have any stake in, and be able to have a peaceful existence if realistically possible.

Im NOT saying that I want to be without conflict or violence... Im saying that I need a reason to believe in what were doing... I see games like CoD how it is an arbitrary war situation. Invasion! Terrorism! The same dull point we have seen over and over again. I want to know, how did we get here?

How we got here for video games (Call of Duty 376, Battlefield 24, Far Cry 34, Hitman 27, Tomb Raider 41, Wolfenstein 11, etc), plus the other recycled made-in 1993-2004 era decade franchises that seem to be all the AAA studio's can keep mindlessly over-seqelling, etc) is simply the same problem Hollywood has with "brand new" +2010 series like... Lethal Weapon, MacGyver, Magnum PI, Dynasty, Hawaii Five-O, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, Charmed, Thunderbirds, She-Ra, Bewitched, etc - chronic, unending, mind-numbing, catastrophically epic levels of severe brain-drain / lack of creativity. They made all the original ideas they seem capable of between 1950 and 2000, and now can do nothing more then remake / reboot / sequel exactly the same stuff over and over and over...

As for non-combat games, there are a lot and they've always beeen there - going back to DOS (eg, Lemmings, many point & click adventures), or pre-PC games (Commodore 64 / ZX Spectrum / older Nintendo games). Point & click adventure games, walking sims, puzzle games genres have the most. Whether or not you like that style of play wll obviously limit the choices. There aren't that many non-walking sim First Person games beyond physics / puzzler style games (eg, Portal, Quantum Conundrum, Talos Principle, The Turing Test, etc). Stuff like Banished, Stardew Valley & This War of Mine are good if you haven't played them.

It sounds like what you're looking for though is some premium AAA open-world Skyrim / Mass Effect like non-combat exploration game where all the combat & war plot is replaced with a series of cleverly written / unusual / interesting sub-plots? Unfortunately, that takes a lot of writing talent which the AAA studio's most capable of pulling off large open-worlders on a technical / budget level are also typically the worst at when it comes to creativity. Hence why no matter how much money you throw at them, all you can now expect is more Battlefield, Call of Duty, Doom, Far Cry, etc. As mentioned though, it's not even a video game limited thing and Hollywood has exactly the same problem - just like you don't look to Michael Bay or spammed Marvell Super-Hero cr*p for modern equivalents of 2001: A Space Odyssey, for the same reason if you want interesting non-combat based games like SOMA, The Witness or The Talos Principle, you basically have to pretend that EA / Square Enix / Ubisoft don't exist and look to Indie's / Middleweight devs for anything creative / unusual / interesting.

I forced myself to finish 'The 100' and god that show was stupid...

I couldn't even finish the first episode. Reminded me of Stargate Universe and how "Beverly Hills 90201 High-School Drama Queens In Space Will Be The Saviour Of Humanity" thing (of which 'The 100' was simply the latest incarnation) really don't work at all. In fact even when I was a teen myself late 80s / early 90s, I still preferred Sci-Fi cast to be a little more "grown up" (eg, Stargate SG1, ST:NG, Quantum Leap, etc). I don't think they've ever got that "35-60 year old script-writers writing for average 16-25 year characters as if they're all 11-14 parent-hating sulky Emo's" thing right even in normal Drama's, let alone Sci-Fi/Drama hybrids. Pretty much anything "made to appeal to teens" always ends up overly childish - even for the teens they're trying too hard to appeal to...

 

[Icarus Roun]

Ok, so for some reason my computer wont allow me to stick quotes, so I need to do this manually...

Craig234:
"Icarus, it seems you have a bit to learn, that the rule for wars is that they are about some powerful interests who think they'll gain by the war, even if that's just more power, and that others suffer the cost of the war and are given myths about glory and patriotism and other things to justify the war and motivate them. That's mostly how it works. It's ugly. It's mostly criminal.

And by the time wars start, most people don't have a lot of luxury to ask about right and wrong. It's more kill or be killed.

Try a book, "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", for some commentary on the societal attitudes about war."

I dont think you understand what im saying. Im not naive about what wars are really all about. What I dont understand, is why all these games are generically war war war nonstop... There are a thousand and one Call of Duty type games out there based on some premise of a real world war. But doesnt that get old? Especially when its all totally fictional? When at the end of the game that conflict you just went through has no meaning once its over? I mean hell, most of these games dont even have meaningful sequels. And once the story mode is finished, 90% of the game is PVP. So what exactly is all that PVP over?

I feel like now I have to repeat myself... Your whole point on the nature of conflict and all of that is kinda void when we look at deathmatch games with no reason to start, no reason to finish, other than because we can. What is that point?

Craig234:
"You mentioned Mass Effect and moral issues. The most striking 'moral choice' I remember, the game forced on you by taking two similar, likable crew members, putting them in separate battles, and creating a situation telling you you could help and save only one of them and the other would be killed. That felt forced and cheap to me.

A game that did better than most - where most strip 'morals' and make it about 'fun and winning' - about moral issues was one designed by people who had been through war as civilians and wanted to help people better understand the experience some in "This War of Mine". That's a pretty haunting game."

So, you dont consider the several instances of calculated genocide to be a moral choice? Deciding whither or not individuals should be allowed to live and what impact they might have? Do we trust the illusive man with real power? I mean hell, just the Selarian request to intentionally betray the Crogan for military support was a big deal throughout the series...

GodisanAtheist:
"Icarus, it sounds like you don't like COD 53 and Battlefield 0.75 and every other derivative wargame out there. You want a fantasy world where the deliniation of good and evil are clear and understandable, and maybe tried to do something different than "kill the other team by hitting them with your rock until they stop moving".

That's fine, I find COD clones boring as heck from a thematic perspective and I love when games give me a method for talking my way out of a situation or making the reasoning behind hitting something with the rock very unambigous.

Also, The Expanse is a fantastic TV show, I can't wait till S4 debuts on Prime..."

Its not that I dont like them, I just want them to have a purpose. We find nothing but boobs bragging about how easy it is to no-scope someone and I even met one guy who did trick shots just to be annoying. I mean setting your camera to max rotation and whirling around to fire a random shot and kill someone? Really? That has about five minutes of wow factor then its nothing but dogs barking at a mirror...

YES!!! The Expanse Season four is going to be HUGE!!! From the moment it was clear that the Proto Molecule could cause human extinction it went from being a political drama for me and was purely a thing about the destiny of man kind.

When we got to the end of season three I practically jizzed my pants for how excited I was. Sixteen-hundred new stars at arms reach? SERIOUSLY!!?! Humans could have ample elbow room for the next thousand years!!! In that environment they could drop the earth population down to two or three billion undo all the over development and make it a bread basket again. Can you imagine the commerce that would occur in that nexus? I mean thousands of ships flowing through that space on a daily basis.

Everybody gets what they want. The Belters could find low gravity green belt environments like moons with ecosystems and have all the air and water they could ever ask for. Mars could relax and start their terraforming project as Earth will have paths of least resistance to get what they need. Just keep the range wars to a minimum and the golden age has arrived!

PrincessFrosty:
"I can relate to the desensitization, when you say you've seen a car chase 100 times it's no longer really exciting, like with any other kind of stimulus we need more, bigger, better to give us the same emotional impact, it's like with drug users that 'chase the dragon', they want to feel the same high they felt the first time they did the drug but they'll never get that again because as your body gets used to the stimulus you get less and less reward and so you need an ever bigger stimulus until you kinda top out, with drug users they literally overdose. We're in an era where there's so much media being produced that you can't even consume it all, we're saturated with stories. And to speed up this process capitalism is rewarding the people who produce the media that has the most emotional impact and so everything is hyper stimulus which desensitizes people faster.

Part of good story telling is making the characters likeable and relatable, if you form a connection with that character then you begin to care for them and whatever happens to them has a larger emotional impact on you. You're starting to see this more and more with TV because you can follow the same characters through many hours of screen time, often 100's, it's why we're starting to see story telling that builds these characters up over many hours and then kills them off, that's the core story telling mechanic of shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. I'm not sure if that's clever or a kinda cheap trick.

People like novelty, they like to see things they haven't seen before, it's partly why Scifi and things set in history are so appealing to us, because they're completely different than our day to day experience. As you see more and more car chases the novelty wears off and you're left looking for more, that can be partly found in the story. Obviously games have one thing that TV, movies and books don't have, which is the ability to interact with the medium and because of that you can build a game that basically has no story, it's just enjoyable for other reasons, and in many games they do have story/narrative but it's nothing more than a vehicle to deliver other game elements, like in your typical CoD and Battlefield games. So games are always going to be a medium open to bad storytelling it's kinda inherent in the medium itself, story isn't strictly necessary.

Some games do have good narratives and story though, you just have to go and find them, Telltale do quite a good job of being mostly an interactive story, I think Ken Levine does a great job with narrative, he made the bioshock games and heavily influenced by Ayn Rand. He has some interesting ideas on narrative and did a talk on 'narrative lego' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p40p0AVUH70 which makes me wonder what he might have in store for us in his next game."

Thats the problem, we live in a world we everything has so much sugar in it that we cant eat anything without sugar. There is a real need in our world to just reset everything to its most basic and natural elements.

As for story telling. I dont care about sports, they are seriously stupid in my eyes. But can you imagine if sports because like video games? Consider this, the NFL bans all teams from the league. There are no more teams. There are groups of players that meet on a regular basis and organize games as often as they like, but no fixed teams, no keeping score. Winning games, losing games, whatever, were here just to kick the crap out of each other to chase a ball...

How interesting would that be? It might be fun for a few days, but then the vast majority of football fans would lose interest because its just not the same as what they liked.

Not having a narrative, is like not having teams in sports. If we dont have a reason to try we lose the desire to try. In every aspect of real life there is a real world narrative at all times. We constantly have a need for something and rarely do anything just for the hell of it. Oh yeah, I decided im going to tear my house down and rebuild it, just cuss.... Im going to strip the engine out of my car and put it back together again, just cuss...

Can you imagine going to school without the purpose of learning anything? What the hell? I dont distinguish fantasy from reality. Were all here to accomplish something, whither its tangible or not. So if you wouldnt do something stupid and pointless in the real world, why would you do that for fun? Thats how you corrupt your own soul... A video game rapist is still a rapist in his soul. So what ever desire comes out into your actions, thats the real you...

Are the things you want what you really want?

BSim500:
I couldn't even finish the first episode. Reminded me of Stargate Universe and how "Beverly Hills 90201 High-School Drama Queens In Space Will Be The Saviour Of Humanity" thing (of which 'The 100' was simply the latest incarnation) really don't work at all. In fact even when I was a teen myself late 80s / early 90s, I still preferred Sci-Fi cast to be a little more "grown up" (eg, Stargate SG1, ST:NG, Quantum Leap, etc). I don't think they've ever got that "35-60 year old script-writers writing for average 16-25 year characters as if they're all 11-14 parent-hating sulky Emo's" thing right even in normal Drama's, let alone Sci-Fi/Drama hybrids. Pretty much anything "made to appeal to teens" always ends up overly childish - even for the teens they're trying too hard to appeal to...

The way The 100 started out had real potential. The last of mankind trapped in space, about to run out of life support. Desperate for a solution they buy themselves more time by thinning the population to conserve resources, while at the same time sending a group of convicts to test the planets surface with the hope of an alternative if they cant solve the problem.

That really had my attention, then having a population of degraded humans still on the planet was the perfect wrench to throw into the situation. The whole problem with the show was that it just became so irrational at every turn.

It could have been the perfect teen age drama. 'oh my god, the real world is scary, we have to be grown ups now...' but in the end it turned into wave after wave of death lottery and pointless conflict with the most paper thin reasoning for why they even have a conflict at all...

I mean shit, the grounders should still be basically Americans, after a century of decline with little education and the sharp drop off to pre industial I could see them having a warped mindset about the world around them but still, culturally, mentally, they should have still been modern America just with the hardness of Conan the Barbarian. The Ark people should have been able to quickly make a peace deal and everything world out reasonably well.

But some how this whole new totally alien culture just springs out of the ground in the space of a few generations, while managing to feel ancient at the same time... What a joke...

BSim500:
"As for non-combat games, there are a lot and they've always beeen there - going back to DOS (eg, Lemmings, many point & click adventures), or pre-PC games (Commodore 64 / ZX Spectrum / older Nintendo games). Point & click adventure games, walking sims, puzzle games genres have the most. Whether or not you like that style of play wll obviously limit the choices. There aren't that many non-walking sim First Person games beyond physics / puzzler style games (eg, Portal, Quantum Conundrum, Talos Principle, The Turing Test, etc). Stuff like Banished, Stardew Valley & This War of Mine are good if you haven't played them."

Maybe im not saying it clearly enough... Its not about non-violence, non-combat, its about not having a good enough reason for violence...

Lately I have been playing Civilization 4 Colonization. I love the notion of creating a colony in the new world and working out your economy, especially with the backing of a well developed Europe. What I find with these conflicts is that is a total lack of cooperation among any of the colonies. A total lack of cooperation between the colonies and the native tribes. Its like the whole game (just as the greater civilization) is designed to put you into a corner were the only way you can get out is through someone else...

I was in a situation where my colony was in the frozen north where food was hard to come by. Rather than work out a trade deal with a southern neighbor I was forced to invade and ultimately conquer about three other colonies, including one of my own faction. There was a point where I had to start a few subsequent wars because the territory lines of my neighbors were so invasive that the only way to control the land directly around my own cities was to demolish the next ones over... Seriously, these cities can only populate one tile from the center, why does my neighbor need six tiles around his...

The whole narrative that lead to my need to invade my neighbors was just plain stupid. It makes me feel like an isolationist prick because in the end all other civs exist to be in my way....Not a quality game...

 

[ImpulsE69]

regarding the 100, it was 400 years, not 100. With no actual civilization, it made sense.

 

[Mamere782]

Well...Love The Expanse...happy Prime is continuing the series. Still, for games with real characters Witcher 3 has a lot going for it, many choices as to moral dilemmas, character development, and real people caught in agonizing situations. Of course it's fantasy, and of course involves fighting, but for a video game, one of my favorites. Witcher 1 and 2 not as good, but sets the back story. Might want to watch the Polish movie on Youtube...with English subtitles. I did like Mass Effect as well. I do not play on line games.