Original: http://9.ce.gl/answers/software/i_hate_video_games_a_lot
Q: care to elaborate at what makes video games so very different? i wish to understand your opinion better.
just for clarification, i have played video games my entire life. i still do. i’m not claiming any kind of superiority here. the text below is stated as fact but should be understood as my (humble) opinion
video games are meant to distract and dismay. they are meant to be commodified and marketed and sold for profit. they are meant to trick you and to lie to you. there are some games that are genuinely born from artistic currents running through the author, but they are so few and far between that you are safe condemning the entire medium
the graphics card in your computer, with all its thousand of concurrent processors and scanout buffers and special DMA memory that’s two or three grades ahead of the normal memory in your computer, is a deceptively beautiful thing. they will paint worlds in front of you which you could never imagine, make the impossible possible. a forever-dream. it achieves this through miracles of technology made possible only through decades of hard work and engineering methodology mankind has not seen until only these very latest moments of its history. there is so much going on here that no one person has a solid understanding of exactly what happens in once piece of this puzzle, let alone the entire contraption itself
the fact this beautiful magnum opus of technology is mass-manufactured and priced to be affordable to consumer markets could be a good thing. but its not. there is not nearly as much depth in these games as people think. the sheer incredible-ness of what you are seeing on your monitor deludes you into thinking an equal amount depth exists in the game
but no! you are looking at verticies. verticies with textures drawn and shaded between them, updated around fifty times a second. you are being dazzled by pretty flashing lights as to distract you from the horrible monotony & repetitiveness you are subjecting yourself to. you are deluding yourself into thinking this is a reality, that you really are korgoth the level 50 barbarian, that you really are the my little pony model in this minecraft mode. you are masturbating. you are constantly masturbating. and you’re alone and will only grow to know that alone-ness more and more
i used to love video games. too much. this was a side effect of my passion for computing. once i started to learn more about how computers worked, i found less and less joy in playing them. it is a lot like people who work in a hotdog factory: they will never voluntarily want to look or smell or eat a hotdog ever again
MMOs are the worst offender in this regard. the idea of ‘grinding’ is sickening to me and i routinely shock and baffle myself when i see my hands hitting the keys for no other reason than to change a few bits on a server far away. that is all you are doing: trading your life to invert some transistors somewhere. you are tricked into thinking you are accomplishing something, but you are doing the exact opposite of that. you are repeating an effortless task for no reason. and you are paying for that privilege
there could be a redeeming factor here: the social aspect of these games. interacting with real, live human beings is much less soullessly asinine than flipping bits
but –
have you ever noticed how, in any given multiplayer game, the general attitudes between people are generally hostile? a hostility much nastier than what you find between athletes playing a physical sport. a hostility born out of a perceived sense of superiority everyone seems to hold over everyone else. when i look at the “e-sports athletes” that play heroes of newerth or league of legends or dota or whatever the flavor of the week is this week, on their backlit razor keyboards, prescription bottle of amphetamines close at hand, i see a broken, broken person
you know that book that kafka wrote about the man who turns into a beetle? this is what i see. someone who is starting to become less and less of a human being once capable of producing the miracles of technology that drive these hell machines and more like a beetle. a disgusting beetle that has one singular self-serving focus and will anxiously hiss and scuffle with anything that might get in the way of that
this is not just the people who play those competitive moba games though – people have chosen all sorts of twisted paths to take revolving around centering their lives around a game. they all end up resembling some kind of reptile, although each with their own set of horrible idiosyncrasies and revolting lifestyles
these are harsh words, but they are not born from anger i hold against these people. they are from my own journey in life, something i don’t like to get into often:
i used to be a very, very unhappy person. i have an innate passion deeply seated inside me that involves the very same machines enslaving these people. just as i am today, i was routinely blown away and fascinated by even the simplest of concepts. i grew up and found a horrible, horrible feeling welling up inside me. i had no idea what it was, but every time i sat down and double clicked on the internet explorer icon i felt it. the feeling itself was bad enough, but the fact i only felt it when interacting with something i thought i dearly loved exacerbate it by a million. it was a very confusing time in my life
something is not right here. this is all wrong
between that point and now, i have come a long way. i have learned a lot about myself and a lot about this horrible feeling and how to avoid it. all of that is a story i do not wish to share, but between then and now my computer usage habits have changed considerably. i do not look at tiled, floating 3D windows that have nice transparency effects at the edges. i do not constantly watch 1080p streamed videos or attempt to do my work in a big fancy pretty mockery of an environment
this is what i see when i start any given computer i own:
$ █i see this, and the feeling goes away