Only logged in members can reply and interact with the post.
Join SimilarWorlds for FREE »

I Love Video Games

Not all video games are great, but they have the capacity to be the most beautiful, most expressive forms of art in circulation. Though in their name they may sound trivial.. Video. Games. They're games you play on something electronic, at least that's what their name infers, and sometimes that's all they are, but sometimes they're so much more. Video games are entire worlds you create, with rules and laws as you, or a group of people, create, it's the materialization of a dream, a vision. They're one of the most powerful methods of communication, allowing you to be in circumstances where in your normal life you maybe never would have, situations you've never thought of, that you may experience later in life or never at all. They give you the ability to make meaningful decisions, where your actions can have an impact on the world around you, whether immediate or over time. As a gamer it can feel as if you're travelling to a new world, exploring it and interacting with it, trying to understand it and testing your own abilities in it, you can even try to make it your own. You can explore beautiful environments and see great feats of architecture that are absent in our own world. There are so many different facets of expression in video games, where in movies and in music there is indeed great expression, you see the world that the directors create, you hear the stories and feel the emotions of the artists when they sing, but in video games you can do these things and more, it can be an entire world of art, everything inside deliberately crafted. Like in a piece of art, the artist paints the world to life, but in three dimensions, the amount of meaning and symbolism, the amount of beauty and expression, is limited only by the minds of those creating the game.
This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »
xSharp · 31-35, M
play operation flashpoint?
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
No, I never have, what's it like?
xSharp · 31-35, M
@Winterwanderer: before it was released to the public it was used as a training tool for the marines. very intense very realistic. but still, dated by todays standards, only for a true connoisseur of fps tactical squad shooters. was only 10 bucks when i got it on 360 marketplace.
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
That sounds amazing, a war simulator first & a video game second, I like the sound of that, that sounds like a cool way to develope games - with real world applications, or translating them either from or to real world uses
xSharp · 31-35, M
@Winterwanderer: the game was hard and unforgiving with confusing with complex squad commands and controls and if you take a cap to the dome, much like real life you will not realize that you are dead, leg wounds cripple and slow you down and arm wounds mess with your aim, you can bleed out if your medic doesnt stabilize you. the minimum engagement distance 80% of the time is at least 500-600 meters luckily your standard issue scopes are already zeroed for around that distance anyway. so yeah all these 12 year old call of duty players didnt want this game, mainly because its for men, the company went out of business because of this.
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
Wow, this sounds like my kind of game, I like intense realism & difficulty in games, especially if it's meant to mirror reality like these war games. Honestly, that sounds like an fps I'd actually play, I don't normally like contemporary ones because they're so kitsch, they're just so unbelievable & have so little complexity.

I like the idea that not all games are not meant to be beat, or that they're not [i]just[/i] for the players, but also like an artistic expression of the creators, or even less artsy - if games appeal only to the general public, they won't innovate much for fear of losing consumers.
xSharp · 31-35, M
@Winterwanderer: one more thing about this game is there is ALOT of walking like 5 klm worth before the first objective., its an open world battlefield and the game wants you to get impatient and rush ahead, thats usually when you get assaulted in a wide open field with no cover, military knowledge comes in handy in these situations, especially when engaged by spec ops. there is multiplayer coop and vs as well.
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
And this is an older game? It sounds like it has some advanced concepts.
xSharp · 31-35, M
@Winterwanderer: operation flashpoint: dragon rising is a game from 2009. yet it has excellent bullet physics.
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
Because they probably made their own system for it, game developers don't tend to place too much value on making games have their own reality as much as giving them the basics. I understand that it's cheaper & easier to not emphasize physics, but at the same time, they make a game do much more believable, physics make a game feel like it could possibly exist.
xSharp · 31-35, M
@Winterwanderer: this one time me and a friend were playing coop and i was so high that i accidentally called in an artillery barrage on our own position! i panicked and just yelled at him to run and we took off, at about 100 meters from our original position my partner looked back for me, i was only 25 to 30 meters away from him and he watched me take a direct hit from a shell, i was vaporized and all that was left were a few chucks of meat and a hole. my partner laughed his ass off and told me that he had it on video and saved it on his xbox one somehow. despite i was playing on a 360 we could still play together. random stupid moments happen in this game as well and are just as much fun as the game itself.
Winterwanderer · 26-30, M
That sounds amazing hahahah, did it look pretty real too? It's hard to imagine actual marines doing something like that, I guess that's kind of why it's funny to me.