Does any of it mean anything at all?

[Gragt]

Humans cannot survive without entertainment.

They can. It doesn't make them happy though.

 

[non]

does anything mean anything at all?

Not to the universe objectively. The human mind creates meaning for itself though, and it's this meaning we are talking about, which should go without saying. Moving on.

 

[TripJack]

so we are talking about meaning which has no meaning

 

[mck]

 

[Renegen]

Semantics. Video games have always been about entertainment in the grand scheme of things. Whether or not they are challenging is more a difference of degree (of entertainment) versus kind.

You could say that traditional art and classical music were always just entertainment to the church/nobility or just propaganda for use by the church/nobility but that doesn't keep it from being more. Art is a funny thing, and 1000 years from now someone could say CoD was art for reflecting American values while Anno was art for reflecting European values and Sengoku Rance was art for reflecting japanese values.

And even if profit drives every decision in the industry, we know there is still room for more. Everyone at their job is either told or imagines that they accomplish more than their job description, everyone wants to be part of a greater movement. I saw a documentary on Starbucks and their previous VP of Global Operations, who everyone said how wonderful he was, genuinely believed that by making coffee more successful he would promote more conversations between people.

I find it very interesting that this version of things that the world is a cold dead, profit driven, place keeps coming back again and again. It's continuously used as an excuse to dismantle things. I say, why try to go against something that is human? Gaming should be more than mindless entertainment.

 

[LoPan]

Question is what the word 'entertainment' means, because if the dictionary definition is the intended meaning of the word when used here then video games could well be but toys.

The argument that humans need entertainment is fickle because what it implies is that humans need to not do something useful for certain periods of time in the day, which doesn't lend video games a credence to importance over the combination of a plastic firetruck and a good imagination.

It seems the more sophisticated and advanced civilization becomes the more desire the people of that society have for things that are without use, what that means I have no idea, and that is a maze of language-fumbles that we should not go into.

The strange detail about playing video games is that from time to time people who play video games will end up disillusioned with them and may even renounce the practice altogether. This never happens in any other medium of 'entertainment' such as books, movies or picture-watching.

Intellectual value is not denoted by something supplying knowledge, a book does that better and so does being alive in general do it better than any video game could or should attempt to. Neither is intellectual value the same as pragmatic value because video games are useless; some examples were supplied to the contrary but these are rare and of a very dubious actual use.

No one ever really questions whether movies, books or art (as in pictures, sculptures and so on) have intellectual value because they, at the very least, if done properly, supply a person with a perspective and a perception different from his own, which is inherently valuable to the brain. Games, however, with some exception, spend most of their time preying on our brains (the Skinner Box being the most casually used technique) in such a way as to keep us playing for no particularly good reason.

Video games have proven to at times have value, but something like Deus Ex (the golden example) has no value in its gameplay, only in its story which could have been as good without the gameplay.

And so in an attempt to focus this question I ask whether the expression of game mechanics (press button to do thing) can have any value for creative expression, or can it only be used to create the equivalent of children's toys?



I heavily doubt we'll find an answer, at best we'll find a good question, to this confusing question; however, I am interested in peoples thoughts on the notion. It strikes people differently, and it strikes most with a seemingly bitter cynicism, some with the compulsion to subscribe people 'The Wall', but surely the fact we cannot find an answer to this basic of a question is in itself highly questionable.

 

[MasterSmithFandango]

Paradox games have greatly improved my geography, and it piqued my interest in the history of a few countries/regions I was relatively ignorant of.

 

[Black Cat]

Japanese games taught me more about fetishes than I thought there was to learn, and then showed me all I had learned was nothing but the tip of, uhm, the iceberg. I don't know whether to be thankful or hold a grudge, though. :/

http://fold.it/portal/

Solve a real scientific problem by haphazardly creating proteins.

I can already imagine the thrilling social interactions to be found in, and to be grown off, such game.

Gaming should be more than mindless entertainment.

Gaming is more than mindless entertainment, and games have effects on people regardless of how stupid it may actually make you feel to be affected by dumb entertainment. However, there is no need to actually go and try too hard to actually make them be something more: They are more by virtue of interacting with actual people and being created by people, and at most you can try to be sure the something more your game will have is the something more you want to express instead of some random something more born out of cultural and personal context. Even then you can't control the outcome as any experience, and both entertainment and gaming is something you are experiencing, needs to be interpreted first, and you can't control the context through which, and into which, it will be interpreted.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Mindless entertainment is an oxymoron- the mind is the only thing that can BE entertained. Even something as banal as snack food makes you think about shit that has important ramifications in the long run, even if it's something as simple as being reminded of the importance of having money (or the importance of time to enjoy stuff when you're not making money.)

 

[halflingbarbarian]

One of the important things gaming taught me was about my personality in regards to resource management. From the earliest HoMMs to Civs to cRPGs like Ultima, M&M, Fallout, etc., I realised that I am very conservative in regards to risk and tend to be thrifty, for no particular reason (maybe some sort of feeling of security?).

In HoMM, for e.g, I rarely had the patience to build up and manage a 'castle' other than my starting one; my strategy always involved waiting for creature stacks on my (again) only hero to pile up, and then complete the mission at one go. In Civs, I am what the strategy forums would call a 'builder'; I cannot grasp for the death of me how to have an expansionist empire. In cRPGs, I save ammo/mana/health/potions up until the end of dungeons/areas, when all these resources mean nothing anymore.

For me it's a flaw of character because I ought to be more flexible and have less anxiety towards ambition / less caught up with details. Therefore nowadays I only play 'wide' empires in Civ 5, and use whatever I have on hand to make encounters in cRPGs (for e.g Skyrim at the moment) easy, as opposed to hard w/ reloads aka using scrolls, potions, etc. Gotta develop that part of the mind as well, I guess.

Edit: Of course gaming also helped alot with learning English, Geography, and History.

 

[Metro]

Question is what the word 'entertainment' means, because if the dictionary definition is the intended meaning of the word when used here then video games could well be but toys.

Okay.

 

[LoPan]

Question is what the word 'entertainment' means, because if the dictionary definition is the intended meaning of the word when used here then video games could well be but toys.

Okay.

'Is' is a copula, it binds the subject and the predicate, 'is' does not alter the meaning of anything. The predicate alters the meaning of the subject. 'Is' has a very specific usage and there is no use of 'is' wherein it alone alters the meaning of another word. 'Entertainment' however is a word applied to an incredible variety of situations and things in the world and this broad application of the word makes its actual meaning insubstantial. To say that videogames are entertainment is to say they distract the mind by use of delight, but what that description of the word 'entertainment' means I'd doubt anyone would entirely agree with, and if they did: what intellectual value can be found in something that 'distracts the mind by use of delight'?

If you are to argue the value of entertainment you must first decide what 'entertainment' means since it is the meaning of the word that is being argued and so the meaning of word in the circumstances of the point must be decided.

 

[Serious_Business]

I learned to treat other human beings as NPCs to exploit or ignore.

Funny, but you can bet this autist asshole has the sensibility and the empathy of a pair of boots. You can also bet that his disgust at himself, others and the world were not helped by the fact that he spent so much time avoiding these issues on video games.

does anything mean anything at all?

Not to the universe objectively. The human mind creates meaning for itself though, and it's this meaning we are talking about, which should go without saying. Moving on.

Maybe you should stop moving so fast. How does meaning become objective to the universe? An object is an object. A rock is an object, for example. How do you extract meaning from a rock? Unless you're a theist, you don't, and I know you're too smart for that shit. So what the fuck are you saying here?

Meaning is dependent on perspective, but the problem with the objectivist point of view which cries about this fact flattening their world view is just that it doesn't understand that without perspective, there is no meaning. And the objectivist world view destroys all perspective. Anyway fuck this shit

My take on it, I think games as escapism can potentially have two sides. One is obvious, it makes you fat, apathetic and disgusting. The other is something else - it stimulates your imagination and makes you question the world as it is. There's not much that'll stimulate you to question the world today, because cows don't ask questions, so I see that as a huge positive. Effectively, those silly video games are making you transcend the world and see things from a different angle.

 

[Zomg]

Games have telos: Win

Thus they are an image of God's love and the only art form