Game over matter: what's plaguing our current competitive gaming culture

             I was in a game of League of Legends, where I found myself dealing with the normal slew of complete jerks. My teammates decided they both wanted to go mid, but instead of explaining this move to us they decided to just both call mid last minute and leave it at that. When the neglected lane started to be pushed, they began the normal barrage of harassment, making sure that everyone else but them in the game knew how much of noobs we were. Eventually I got tired of it and told them to shut up and suggested that we switch to a more conventional meta. But they insisted that we were "noobs" and continued to be complete assholes the entire game. When it became clear these guys were refusing to play the game in a way we could win, I started to feed in retaliation.
           To this reaction one of the players stated this, " I can forgive anything you say to me, but I can't forgive feeding, that's a no in the game." This is wrong. This is a clear example of how the culture of competitive gaming has its priorities mixed up. It doesn't matter what in game transgressions one does, the act of attacking a player as a person should always be weighed as the most grave offense. Someone who "feeds" or goes "AFK" or anything that isn't directly targeted to hurt a particular player cannot be considered worse than someone who is devaluing another person. That's because the game is ultimately a fantasy. Sure, high stake tournament matches might be different, but for the bulk of LoL games, a single game is a short 1hr instance, where a bad player or bad player behavior can ruin your game, but not your night. Hurtful language and discriminatory slang can successfully do both.
         Intentional feeding and other similar behavior are very rare in  a game like LoL because the time commitment one has to undergo when joining a game deters people from trying to troll games. Trolling only works when it can be done efficiently. If I have a horrible team I can troll 4 different people every 20 minutes in LoL, in the most efficient scenario. Compare this scenario to online games like Halo where a new trolling experience can be accessed within minutes, with little to no penalties for dropping matches. LoL makes it so that those who want to intentionally feed, won't get very much satisfaction for doing so. Yet players still hold this near deification of the game meta, while ignoring how they hurt actual people.
         One might say that the same deter for trolling exists in negative language (basically people who want to go around being rude can do so at the same rate as those who want to around intentionally feeding). This is true, but ignores the fact that while using this hurtful language players can still derive the benefit from playing the game and winning the game at the same time. If one intentionally feeds, chances are high that their team is going to lose.
        This culture of "game over people" needs to stop. When I look through Tribunal cases and see people being punished for horrible play and/or intentional feeding, while those in their chat ridiculed them a and belittled them, I see a huge example of injustice. It's time the video game community looked itself in the mirror and top sugarcoating the message. People matter more than games. It's that simple.

Scott Pilgrim: The Video game metaphor

          The classic mode for video games was stage-> boss battle. It then became more complicated with  barriers such as stage-> mini-boss-> boss battle. Then from this mode video games exploded into a million different directions, with some focusing on stages and others focusing on boss battles and others going to new horizons. But no matter what, many of us hold dear the old method of fighting several bosses to get to the final resolution. This is what drives the plot of Scott Pilgrim. Each ex boyfriend was a boss and with the defeat of each one Scott got closer to the resolution. When watching this movie as a gamer, every single classic game experience you ever had is activated and suddenly the movie becomes the interactive space where you used to dwell as a kid. It's great for gamers and gaming culture to be used in this light. This kind of inter-textual conversation is exactly what video games need.
       Scott Pilgrim is the beginning of a rich conversation about what role video games play in our lives. Clearly, with the success of the movie, video games play a huge role in many people's lives. The boss battle paradigm was adopted as a key plot driving mechanism. The movie wasn't in the business of throwing around random video game references, but instead linking these references to how people feel about particular game mechanics. The coin mechanism which always let us know we were making progress. The lives mechanism, which at times could be unforgiving or a savior. And the continue screen that always begged the question of "what is to come next". These things don't just hold nostalgic value, but intrinsic value to us. This intrinsic value comes in the form of personal anecdotes and experiences about people's favorite classic game. Scott Pilgrim brought these stories back to life.
           Now, I know that one might read this and think I'm bias. Of course the video game blog and video game blogger is going to have a video game centered viewing of the movie. To this criticism I have no retort. This is one lens that is hardly ever used and it makes me happy that I have found a movie that allows me to use it. I hope more movies look to video games for context in the future. 

Party Games: The infinite regression into boredom

               I don't know about anyone else but I grew up playing party games. I grew up a Nintendo kid, so Mario Party and Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. were games that I was raised on. And even today I find myself going back home or into someone's room, just to pop in my old disc of Mario Party 4 and go to town against whoever was unlucky enough to play with me (I'm competitive). The point is that these games are integral parts of our childhood and yet whenever you think about them today, you can't really recall any modern gems coming up and taking their place. This could possibly be because we were idiots as kids and now that our standards are higher we don't find the same drivel fun anymore. But then why is it that it's still fun to play the mini-games in pokemon stadium? No amount of nostalgia could get me to play voltorb charge if I didn't find it a little fun. So, we're left with this gaping question of why has party games fallen off the edge and what can we do to get them back. Well let's delve in, shall we?
             
Low Risk, High barrier to Entry
                The first issue with party games is that fact that they are intended to be low risk options for publishers. Publishers expect a certain number of families to buy a given party game, according to the amount of families who bought the same game the year before. This leads to incredibly formulaic creation processes where creativity is stifled and similar mechanisms are being reinforced. For example, the repeatably press (insert button here) mini-game is one that has be reinvented for essentially every single Mario Party game. Whenever you come across this game it's usually to fill something up or to make you move. Sure the novelty of the game probably stuck around from Mario Party 1-5, but by the time I got to Mario Party 8 I was so tired of pressing the A button so fast my finger fell off. But the developers continue putting this game in because it's the low risk option and with the barrier to entry for video games being so high, developers can't afford to take anything but a low risk option.

Aggressive consumer feedback
               Since the barrier to entry is so high for video games, publishers would much rather take these risks on gamers they perceive to be more susceptible to new forms. These gamers tend to be teenagers (14-18) and more experienced, which developers hope will lend them to being more willing to pick up new game play. They perceive the bottom line audience of party games to be casual gamers, so they make sure the games keep the same formula.The reality of the matter is that there is a mix of casual gamers and hardcore gamers playing these party games. Hardcore gamers want to sit back and play mario kart too. But they don't enjoy playing the 5th rehash of rainbow road (ok sometimes nostalgia kicks in, but come on Mario Kart you essentially rehash every single stage you've ever made in your latest game). Also, even casual gamers can admit that party games have simply lagged in terms of innovation. They don't change. Every party game is just like every other party game. What happened to the ground breaking multi-vehicle races of Diddy Kong racing? Before Smash bros, Clay fighters showed you can take fun semi recognizable characters and toss them into a fighting game. These games were huge risks and given huge rewards through purchase. Consumers need to counteract this lag by refusing to buy these party game rehashes. That's the only way.

A Microcosm of the industry
           Party games represent the worst case scenario for video games, which I guess in retrospect isn't too bad. It highlights how the high barrier to entry prevents publishers from being willing to take risks, regardless of the potential profit. This leads us to keep recreating the same game, only applying comsetic changes to the game itself. Sometimes this works. Sometimes all people want to do is play a shooter in a recreation Jurassic park. But eventually even your own fantasy land gets tiring when the game play is the same thing being reused over and over. Some ways to combat this is by having an indy game sub publisher (ahem Sony) or by offering funding to flash games that earn a certain amount of viewership. Regardless, developers and publishers need to take these risks and we as consumers need to send them the message that we want some change. If publisher have a creative outlet, then the industry will see people being much more engaged every single time a new gem is created and marketed. 

The next step: Video games cementing themselves as mediums of art

         Just recently the video game show Extra Credits released their weekly video where they talk about a specific topic that is pertinent to the state of gaming. Today's topic was about fun and how the industry constantly feels the need to infuse fun into their games. The idea behind this is that games are made simply as forms of light hearted entertainment and when one wants to stray away from this formula of success they'd better pay homage to fun in some way, shape or form. This can come in the form of humorous jokes in Fallout 3 or the odd in level jokes on maps in Halo; the point is that these games, when put under close scrutiny, exhibit this conscious effort by developers to infuse "fun" into their game. Now do these things make their games worse off? No, definitely not, but that doesn't mean we should continue making every single game like this. That's because when a developer decides to force "fun" into their game they then have to make drawbacks in other aspects because there's nothing fun about someone making a joke concerning an incredibly serious situation. This limits the medium from ever gaining respect as an art form, because people assume whenever a game takes on a serious topic, at some point in time they'll have to trivialize it with fun. For video games to be able take a step forward they're going to need to shed the handicap of fun and begin to take on different more serious genres.
     Now I already can hear the criticism from a mile away. Keep your art out of my video games. This kind of behavior by gamers is exactly what keeps developers and publishers from ever trying to publish anything ,but fun. Gamers who want to see the medium progress need to accept that video games don't need to follow this creed of fun. Games can be made to depict different aspects of the human experience. In fact, many games do that today, but are always held back by the fun handicap. On  the site, many people were angry because they felt Extra Credits was making much ado about nothing, when in fact many of them probably just can't see how fun is infused in the most serious of games. Let's take Sim City  (NES) where you're able to summon Bowser to destroy your town whenever you feel your town is getting a bit too ungrateful. Sure, this is incredibly funny, but all it serves to do is remind you that you're playing a game and that the town that you tended for isn't real. This runs completely opposite to the purpose of the game, which is to help simulate what it's like to create and run your entire town from scratch. The fact that you are able to destroy all of that is fun, but ultimately counter productive to immersion. It's hard to feel accomplished of a world when Koopa can come down at any moment and destroy it all. The point is, that there are plenty of games where fun is just forced in, regardless of the serious context and tone of the game.
    Does this mean I want to get rid of the sim city's of the gaming industry? No. I just want another game that's completely serious to be able to be put out as well. No one is rejecting fun wholeheartedly, they're just giving some other human expressions some love. And I bet you'll find if the majority of gamers encouraged this switch, video games would begin to have far more influence and respect than it ever did before.