Characters or Nope?
In the first article, Video Games are better without Characters; it brought to mind several games that I played growing up. Not only bringing back the memories of playing these games, also the way we had to originally go local libraries to get most of them while GameStop was becoming a franchise before our eyes. A few of these games mentioned in the article, such as SimCity, Sims, and the classic game of Tetris. All of course don’t have characters, but the two games of Sims both revolve around the management of people even though you don’t actually play as them. By starting from scratch and developing new cities or populations it gave the user the ability to get a taste of all that is involved with the running of city. Like it says in the article, no one would actually ever want a person playing the Sims to run his or her city, let alone be in the management of building it. By giving this insight it was allowing people to experience the ideology of real world jobs while making it enjoyable and more engaging. The next big step with this was the introduction of Sims Health. Much like the idea of SimCity, the game gave the user to control and design their own creations while using the computer game, one of the big things for when this game came out was that it was during the time President Bill Clinton was in the process of redefining Health Care within the United States, which it then later became the AHCA. Even though the game was never a hit it still helped open the door for many games to come.
As mentioned in the article it discussed having characters based more from people that are actually in our society rather than the fictional made up, either super strong and ridiculously unachievable men or the woman who are incredibly skinny while also being ridiculously fit that always wear little to no armor. Now I agree the current characters are a bit out of the normality, but if we were to base our characters on the real people of society then games would lose a big driving factor of theirs, which is people want to play and be something they aren’t. No one plays a video game to just play a digital version of themselves or their neighbor Steve and continue on with their lives but on the TV now. They are playing games because they want to be the God of War and destroy creatures or demons the size of skyscrapers while wielding weapons heavier than a teenager. It is not surprising to see boys wanting to play as girl characters, they either have the girls dressed in ways that is provocative or simply back to the point made earlier about them wanting to play as something they cant be in real life.
Continuing from the idea where there last paragraph ended, the next article, The Pitfalls of trying to Tell Stories Outside your Own experience, references a game that falls into the trap of basing the game much to similar to real world. The game uses stereotypes and biases to push its learning and lessons onto the reader. Creating less trust into characters that are not even white but also not even male. In one of the objectives you are to help this girl within the game and no matter what you end up doing you cant get the girl to agree or comply with what it is you’re saying to her. This was to teach the lesson that sometimes no matter what you do to try and help people, bad things will happen. Granted the creator came out saying that this was the point and not a bug or glitch but rather to help drive home the lesson of how this effects people in the real world. The game also uses the ideas brought from early American culture when white people first came to the country and how it took years to help change the distrust that has been ingrained into these people for years. After reading this snapshot of how the game is played and theories that are built into the playing process, I personally couldn’t see myself ever playing it just because it would feel simply too close to real world and taking away the biggest factor from video games, which is to escape the real world. Until they discover ways to make human history more interesting and engaging enough that would still give the player the ability to escape to a new reality, bringing real life stereotypes and ideas into video games just simply wont be effective.
Citations:
Bogost, Ian. “Video Games Are Better Without Characters.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 13 Mar. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/video-games-are-better-without-characters/387556/.
Brewster, Kat. “The Pitfalls of Trying to Tell Stories Outside Your Own Experience.” Waypoint, Vice, 22 May 2017, waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/9k9vw5/the-pitfalls-of-trying-to-tell-stories-outside-your-own-experience.
