demagogue on 21/4/2014 at 22:42
Quote Posted by dethtoll
"you ever notice that you never hear wow stories like me and a bunch of my friends did this quest and we killed a huge dragon and it was awesome, it's always bitching? ... anyway the point of my story (other than assuring you that horses are nuts) i think if you tried a parsnip fakeout on a horse they'd bite your head off. therefore horses are smarter than wow fans."
There's only one good response to this comment. You know the one.
[video=youtube;LJSFlMCTXE8]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJSFlMCTXE8[/video]
Renzatic on 22/4/2014 at 01:46
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
One aspect of the conditioning is that current AA titles teach you to take every instruction at face value, and to play along with what the game's environment wants you to do. The idea of trying to subvert the game's environment was completely alien to the testers.
I'd say that's more a case of modern gamers being over-coddling than it is them being psychologically conditioned. They're used to games that lead them along to the next big action scene, so they won't know quite what to do when playing something that leaves them entirely to their own devices. It's simple unfamiliarity.
Case in point, COD multiplayer stands in complete opposition of the singleplayer game, and doesn't require people to follow simple onscreen instructions to make any progress. Yet despite this, your average COD player does pretty well in MP. Regardless of what you think of team deathmatch type games, they do require quick reflexes and being able to think on your feet a bit to play well.
And Demagogue wins this thread and all threads forever with that horse video.
Tony_Tarantula on 22/4/2014 at 03:00
Quote Posted by Renzatic
I'd say that's more a case of modern gamers being over-coddling than it is them being psychologically conditioned. They're used to games that lead them along to the next big action scene, so they won't know quite what to do when playing something that leaves them entirely to their own devices. It's simple unfamiliarity.
Case in point, COD multiplayer stands in complete opposition of the singleplayer game, and doesn't require people to follow simple onscreen instructions to make any progress. Yet despite this, your average COD player does pretty well in MP. Regardless of what you think of team deathmatch type games, they do require quick reflexes and being able to think on your feet a bit to play well.
And Demagogue wins this thread and all threads forever with that horse video.
That's....more or less what conditioning is. The fact that they behave a certain way when they perceive it as "campaign" or "single player", and behave in another manner when they're in a multiplayer mode is evidence of what I'm talking about.
Quote:
horses are smarter than wow fans
It's a tossup between whether the sarcastic or the literal meaning is true.
Inline Image:
http://i332.photobucket.com/albums/m351/kidkenobi_2008/fry-can-t-tell-meme-generator-not-sure-if-sarcasm-or-serious-e14739.jpgRenzatic on 22/4/2014 at 03:50
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
That's....more or less what conditioning is. The fact that they behave a certain way when they perceive it as "campaign" or "single player", and behave in another manner when they're in a multiplayer mode is evidence of what I'm talking about.
Then you could claim that training and learning and forms of mental conditioning. It's like saying that someone who plays RPGs has been mentally condition for that gameplay style, and therefore finds first person shooters entirely alien. You wouldn't be wrong exactly, though claiming as much would be stretching the term into the semantics.
When you bring up Skinner Boxes, you're talking about operant psychological conditioning, which is ENTIRELY different than what you're talking about above. It's Pavlovian stuff, applying certain stimuli to force a desired response. To use a really rough example, if you want someone to hate chocolate, you give them a bar, and while they're chewing on it, you electrocute them with a cattle prod. If you do this enough in a controlled environment, that person will eventually form an aversion to chocolate. You've trained them to unconsciously associate that taste with that pain.
That's conditioning. What COD does isn't. That's training.
Yakoob on 22/4/2014 at 05:37
I see Tony's point, even with loose terminology as Renz noted. Basically, I agree that CoDs and the such are somewhat training people to "follow the prompts" and expect the easy way out in games. Hence things like the Boyle mission - people were trained going against NPC orders leads to insta-fail, so it doesn't even occur to them to try it. It's kind of how we all intuitively avoided the pitfalls in original Mario.
The broadening of gaming sphere and introducing many new players (like frat boys jumping on Halo) has definitely brought more stupids and inexperienced ones in. Tho I'd wager churning out CoDs also somewhat contributes to reinforcing not-thinking-too-much gameplay.
So did games make people stupid in-game, or are games dumb down for stupid people? Both, really, I'd say - it's a self-propelling cycle.
Muzman on 22/4/2014 at 05:39
There's a reverse to all of that as well, it seems to me anyway, and that's the tendency to be over awed by the data produced by focus groups and treat it almost as gospel. Since their testing isn't very long usually it diminishes the notion that teaching is possible and cuts things down to mere show and tell in a desperate need to 'answer' concerns they apparently raise.
If you're aiming low, yeah there is no telling the depths you can plumb into the console/CoD hole.
I'm optimistic though. I think the success of something like Dark Souls, while still not exactly a 'golden age' PC game in a lot of respects, put the lie to nearly 15 years of xbox fueled game design dogma and developer cowardice.
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 11:23
Quote Posted by dethtoll
At least it was both.
It was good, but not great. I dragged myself through it a second time in anticipation of playing through the sequels after, but it was such hard work that I burned out about 2 hours into BS2. I think it's the overly caricatured world and hackneyed dialogue that I found the most jarring.
faetal on 22/4/2014 at 11:53
Having just read malcolm Gladwell's amazing book Blink, I think I'd like to add something to the "do games make people stupid or vice versa" topic.
One thing which had a chapter dedicated to it in the book was the "Kenna problem". This was basically a singer/songwriter who was lauded and championed by many musicians, producers and promoters and tipped to be the next big thing, but which tested poorly in consumer focus groups. Likewise an experiment carried out based on jam tasting compared people's ratings of the tastes of 16 different jams versus a group who were told to describe 8 distinct characteristics of the jams and then rate them in order. The results were totally different.
With Kenna's music, it seems likely that the focus groups were giving low scores for Kenna not because they didn't like the music per se, but because its style was unfamiliar to them, or because the people in the focus groups do not have the necessary expertise to focus in on the exact properties of the music and assess it in a more granular way. This is why the musicians, producers etc.. were going bugfuck about Kenna, but the focus groups were telling the execs that he wasn't writing hits and thus he never got that big break.
With games, it is likely becoming similar. Because play testing is largely gauging the responses from Joe Public, the assessment of the game is being influenced heavily by baseline expectation and an initial negative response to something which is difficult for them to define conceptually. What you end up with, is games like Bioshock, which are quite good, but lack that "oh my fucking god, this game is amazing" vibe, since all of the jagged edges which would have allowed the game to really have something, were sanded off during focus testing.
I'd be interested to see what the development process for the Souls games was like, since it is exactly against the grain of most of what is being made these days and has that "jesus fuck this game is blowing my mind" thing going on. That said, this is just me spitballing a bit and drawing from a recent read (by the way - read the book, it is great), but possibly worth a bit of discussion (provided I've been coherent enough).
june gloom on 22/4/2014 at 19:11
I think the Souls series had the response it did because the games are Japanese. Japan honestly does not give a fuck about whether a game will be popular in the West or not. Most of the time, that's a negative -- it's why we rarely see new Metroid games and a bunch of the last few have been less than great -- but every once in a while a company like From will put out something that appeals to everybody. I think From at least is aware of their games' smash hit popularity here in the West, and while they're still doing what they do, they like the attention (they're not that big a company) and to be honest their games have historically been practically Western in execution anyway.
Tony_Tarantula on 23/4/2014 at 02:27
Quote Posted by Renzatic
When you bring up Skinner Boxes, you're talking about operant psychological conditioning, which is ENTIRELY different than what you're talking about above. It's Pavlovian stuff, applying certain stimuli to force a desired response. To use a really rough example, if you want someone to hate chocolate, you give them a bar, and while they're chewing on it, you electrocute them with a cattle prod. If you do this enough in a controlled environment, that person will eventually form an aversion to chocolate. You've trained them to unconsciously associate that taste with that pain.
It doesn't have to be blatantly obvious, nor in a controlled environment for all the components of Operant conditioning to be present.
In this case you are rewarded for your ability to quickly and unthinkingly do what the game tells you to, whether that be orders shouted at you by an NPC or your ability to mash the button that flashes on screen as with interaction prompts or QTE's. If you do not do as the game instructs or do something the game does not want you to do, it punishes you in any number of ways such as instant-killing you, having NPC's yell at you for not doing what you were told, or in the case of a poorly-made game by outright breaking.
In this case mainstream gamers have formed an aversion to independent problem solving.....the seem to have been trained to unconsciously associate that with frustration.
