So much ruination in video games. So many different things I can mean by that.
On this page I discuss how I am in general down on most video games and why.
The term video game
has almost become synonymous with gratuitous amounts of violence, gore, and explicit content, whether sexually or in terms of language, and that is what I hate about video games the most.
But I do realize this is an odd complaint to be coming from a Green Day fan. I am coming to that.
An explicit album I can deal with because it cannot swear randomly. Every single problem has an exact place where it appears, which you can memorize and deal with in any way you like. And if any one song is too filthy, you can skip it. Once you know the songs, no unpleasant surprises are possible, and you need only deal with what you have specifically deemed worth it.
But in a typical video game, there is sure to be violence on the rise, or something else problematic, often enough to leave one sick and suffering. You just never quite know when.
Mature,my foot.
Particularly frustrating to me is that so many video games seem to get themselves the harshest rating they possibly can for the sake of it - which is actually, in some important ways, the exact opposite of mature. Plus it violates my philosophy that entertainment should have as large an audience as it reasonably can.
I do put emphasis on reasonably,
however. I have never forgotten how, at the end of its original trilogy, Star Wars alienated anyone who was not a child by having an army of mangy teddy bear-like things save the day. Then came the prequel trilogy. I consider The Phantom Menace to probably be the worst Star Wars movie of them all, and one of the reasons is that it dealt with certainly adult situations, having violent disagreements between governments and organizations further complicated by an unknown threat, yet it made a nine-year-old boy arguably the star and attempted to be funny in any number of simplistic ways that would be accessible to young ones (all of which fell flat, in my opinion). So basically, it was a movie about political and economic turmoil and mysterious, dangerous forces for kids, which made no sense. (Far it be from me to defend the other two prequels either, but at least at that point Star Wars went back to being aimed at adults while leaving open the possibility that younger viewers could join in, lacking the heavy-handed efforts to be sure youngsters would watch them which riddled the two films just discussed.)
These points explain why my site is just aimed at anyone who can agree with me, in general, regardless of their age. No need to make it so you have to be an adult to read the site, but no need to give things adults might appreciate short shrift in order to be accessible to kids either.
No form of entertainment can control what its user can do like a video game. Often there is only one thing you can do to progress, which you may find too difficult or simply not want to do. In either case, being forced to do it anyway happens to and frustrates even the most dedicated gamer.
Their demanding nature has certainly caused me trouble. As you can see from my attempts to base my creativity on LEGO game pirates, even apparently innocuous video game characters can turn into despots if given the chance.
As I always seem to end up having to say, no, them being video game characters, that would make too much sense.
Video games are the contradiction of what real people want. Making things safe and efficient, which is generally a cornerstone of most things desirable, is something video games desperately seek to avoid, with little if any concern for how inaccurate, unbelievable, unrealistic, or nonsensical they make themselves in the process. Their forms of filler range from filling areas with unnaturally hostile beings that have somehow been left unharmed by everyone but you to using utterly impractical equipment to achieve your goal to having bottomless pits, quicksand, lava, or something else you have to stay out of all over the place.
Lava is a particular pet peeve of mine in fiction. There are few things in the universe as dangerous as lava. If the smoke does not kill you, the fact that it makes its surroundings hotter than any oven can get will.
You need not be a scientist to know that if a small geyser of lava burst into a cavern, it would end all life that might be in there. Or at least you should not. But it seems only nonfiction can tell you that. More than a few movies have given in to the horrendous misrepresentation that as long as you stay out of the lava, you are safe, and that ludicrous idea is even more rampant in video games. It seems anyone who has played many of them has jumped a character over lava - or several characters across several games. I regret that I am no exception.
Many things make it difficult or impossible to immerse yourself in the characters of a video game. In the LEGO games, specifically, there are three main such things making clear you are in a forced reenactment of the movie - the fact that there are overly complicated puzzles everywhere you go, the fact that they are all tailored to the exact abilities of your party, no matter who you have or where you are, and the fact that there is always exactly one thing you can do.
Take, for instance, in LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean, when the Turners enter the cabin of the Flying Dutchman. The game often made ships look too small from the outside compared to what their interiors were like, and in particular that scene made the inside of the cabin look about as big as the same level made the entire outside of the Dutchman look. And for what purpose? To make it so Bootstrap Bill had to step on a coral patch, which could transport members of that cursed crew in that game, to get something to help Will get the two of them through these whole complicated booby traps to reach the organ (upon which the game took liberty with its original grandeur by reducing the vast instrument to just one row each of pipes and keys) and steal the key back there.
Questions pour down like the rain. Is this (pardon the Doctor Who in-joke) a TARDIS ship? Is the Flying Dutchman not supernatural enough as it is? What does its captain have to do every time he wants to go play his organ? Why does he not just put a barricade with a coral patch on it over the door so only he and his crew can get in?
Some games, like pinball, just have you sending transmissions through the fourth wall to determine what happens inside it. Video games give you weapons and require consent that you destroy all kinds of things, starting with the fourth wall.
I have determined that one of the differences between me and the video game buffs I know is that they grew up on board games with no characters (e.g. Scrabble) and were therefore more used to thinking things in purely meta terms.
I, on the other hand, have always been able to immerse myself in my games at least a little. An early influence on me was pinball machines. By the time I discovered them, they had multiple voices each, and displays that could spell out what was happening both inside and outside the fourth wall. Then they got better displays that could show pictures as well as text. So they gave me roles I could get into. A particular level of characterization I like to do is, upon the ball draining, explain how I lost in character. For example, the Terminator 2 pinball game has a shot that makes a motorcycle appear on the display, so if that happens shortly before a drain, I say, I wrecked my motorcycle!
(And if that was the end of the game, I add, And I did not survive.
)
The meta stuff and role stuff obviously have some connections in pinball - you have to do this on the playing field to make that happen - but it is somewhat separate compared to video games, where you see every second of what a character is doing, and how much of it involves things that are clearly making the process harder and/or longer for the sake of it. Having grown up with a kind of game in which the events do not unfold in real time and I can translate the meta into the role any way I want, I found this about video games ridiculous, and could not get used to it.
Never could like those barnacled mutants, sir, but I did not want or mean to be that bad to them. It was video game
protagonists,doing it through me. I was not callous of my own accord.You liken them to demons who possessed you. I thought you told me that they were kid friendly versions of the heroes of Pirates of the Caribbean?
It is a game rated for everyone, sir. I think the problem is that video games can make things out of perfectly innocent material that most media require obvious entropy come alive to produce.
The death and destruction the official antagonist of a video game brings is usually nothing compared to that of the player. I often complain that video games are the most arbitrary things in the world, that they decide who the protagonists are based on who the player controls, not on what the characters do.
The Lego games, specifically, I have come to see as employing underhanded psychology, using the likenesses of movie heroes and villains you know to distract from the fact that you smash everything and everyone you encounter and the enemy is really just trying to stop that.
Take, for instance, the source material I based the Comic Five on. So, in the Lego game, a mangy octopus like thing accosts Jack for reasons that never become clearer, but are not difficult to imagine, considering Jack has already broken the pieces of countless people and objects. While Jack and Davy are busy, Will Turner sneaks aboard the ship that has risen from beneath the waves, where he takes advantage of the fact that one of its crew is related to him and uses that to convince said barnacled sailor to help him smash objects all over the ship and then steal the key from the captain. Will then goes with the key to the chest it unlocked, containing the heart of the aforementioned tentacled captain. The pirates fight over what to do with the chest, which resulted in the heart bouncing out of it. An annoyed Davy sends his crew ashore to intervene, and when they are defeated, has the Kraken sink the pirates. But then Jack escapes from the afterworld, which prompts Davy to focus on killing or capturing Jack and his known allies until they kill anyone who is there and not a pirate when they get pulled into a giant whirlpool. The pirates were right and the mutants were wrong when, again? If there was ever a reason to argue that Davy is good and Jack is evil, this is it.