<p>I play counter strike because I like to blow people's heads off.</p>
<p>When I was young, I thought that they were awesome. I just had fun with them.</p>
<p>I continued buying games as I thought they were awesome.</p>
<p>Then I got Age of Empires II, and stayed with the forum community associated with that game from 2001-2003. The stay in the forum community really changed my attitude towards games. For one thing, certainly, it exposed me to the developers who made the games. I no longer saw games as totally awesome things. Rather, they are ways to make money by mass appeal. I still think that some computer games are interesting, in the way that they represent simulations that have so many variations in strategy. But they're not an absolute means to have fun anymore.</p>
<p>A lot of gaming in one's later years come with social components. My gaming never had a social component until then. </p>
<p>That being said, I'm amazed at how I found Runescape so exciting for several months. But I never got into any MMORPGs after Runescape.</p>
<p>When you learn everything within a video game, and realize that most video games fall along similar design platforms, the "awesomeness" of video games really disappears. For some reason, figuring out the game mechanics is still entertaining.</p>
<p>I often think of what I would have gotten into were I a few years younger. Then the hot games wouldn't have been SIM games (before all those Sims expansion packs), but rather, MMORPGs, a number of RTS, and a number of FPS. The last game I really got into was Star Wars Battlefront II. I don't know why - but it was really fun, and one's gameplay strategy was sufficiently varied enough such that it doesn't seem so much like a click-fest (in the way Wolfenstein 3D and MMORPGs are).</p>
<p>==</p>
<p>I hate most adult forms of entertainment. I don't see why people can find staring at sports games for hours on end so fascinating (though I used to be into baseball statistics in 1999). MMORPGs seem that way too. I need something else to have fun in. And that's probably going to be an academic thing. Still, analyzing game mechanics is something I think about from time to time. Not to mention that computer games would be excellent for psychological tests.</p>
<p>Video games are really the only form of mass-entertainment that I find appealing at all (unless you count online forums as one, and I consider them as modes of expression, since I don't really "have fun" on forums, but rather find them as places where there are many prompts to respond to - and to just think). I haven't played much in the last few years, but go in spurts. I like to learn (even if it's the learning of arbitrary rulesets) and to analyze - and video games offer an excellent medium for those tasks. Plus, you don't need to talk to anyone in real life to play video games - nor do you have to go outside of your home. I'm naturally lazy.</p>
<p>I'd like to wait for some number of years and see what video games will be like in the future. Graphics improvements are starting to saturate, so improvements in other areas really should come. But there isn't much motivation to do anything innovative within the gaming industry. I'd like to see MIT EducationArcade release something to the public.</p>
<p>For some reason, I don't like puzzles.</p>
<p>I don't play video games anymore. I got bored with them a year ago or so.</p>
<p>I play WoW for the social interaction. </p>
<p>I used to play CS competitively for money in high school</p>
<p>I used to play SC competitively for bragging rights in high school.</p>
<p>I stopped playing them after I dusted off my NES for my then 6 year-old son and he started whupping my butt. Later on, when N64 was released and he started playing I tried, but failed, to compete with him. The video game market has passed me by. I even bought my son an Atari collection because I played those games in high school. I figured I was a ringer and would finally beat him on whatever platform he was using at the time. But after only 2 or 3 deaths he started whupping me again in each and every game we played.</p>
<p>In the end, after all those hours I spent playing video games...where'd it get me? My son is hooked on them, but it's not something we enjoy together. There IS a social component to the interactive/on-line games...but it's a highly dysfunctional one. Everything that I "learned" with those games that I played is obsolete and antiquated. If you're hooked on video games now...this story is your future. Give it up. Do something useful...like spend hours and hours on College Confidential!</p>
<p>Yeah, I sort of have to agree - you don't really gain much from video games. It does depend on the way you play them. If you design scenarios or maps for computer games - it's an artistic medium that one can use (and arguably no worse than any other artistic medium). If you analyze the game mechanics (villager seconds, gathering rates, and figure out things such as "can I gather more resources if I have 25 villagers before feudalling or 24 before feudalling"), then it's also useful as practice in a sort of reasoning. But the analysis is usually done by the older players on the forums, where the younger players often have little else to contribute to such theoretical models of the game. Very few who play Age of Empires II do what I have mentioned above - or even go to the associated forums. </p>
<p>For me, I don't think I gained that much out of my video games. I do attribute Age of Empires II to my self-studied 5 in AP World History, but that was more due the motivational factor of the game's setting than to the intrinsic content of the game. I gained more out of an online forum associated with the game though - but that again, is independent of the game. </p>
<p>But wait for some number of years - people will find ways to creatively implement education into games (research into it is being done now, by MIT's EducationArcade). This will be REALLY helpful for teaching students where the students get to interact with an environment, rather than passively receive feedback from an instructor. Games are such interesting artificial environments. I often implement them into my thought experiments. But in the way that they're usually played right now - they provide no educational value. <a href="http://www.marcprensky.com%5B/url%5D">http://www.marcprensky.com</a> is an interesting website about the benefits of games, although it's a bit extremist (and though I don't agree with him, I think that some of his points are well-taken).</p>
<p>The other issue is that the main negative effect of gaming is the amount of time people lose to it. MMORPGs usually have very low (novel information/amount learned/amount thought about) to (gameplay time) ratios, and they seem to be unusually popular these days (heck, given that they don't require much more thought than watching TV, I'm not surprised at how popular they are). The (novel information/amount learned/amount thought about) to (gameplay time) ratios often decreases with respect to number of days played since redundancy in stimuli (from playing it over and over again) results in decreasing marginal utility.</p>
<p>One of the most educational games out there - Robocode. Build your own robot using Java, and discuss strategies for the best robot. You learn about Java, AI, and get to join an awesomely intelligent community all for that.</p>
<p>Given that much of the gaming community is in the early teens - ages where people still need prompts to improve their writing and reasoning skills, people can gain A LOT from analyzing video games on an online forum. Even analyzing the community (rather than the mathematics of a game) is an excellent prompt for writing skills (much like writing for a school newspaper would be). But it requires a community that respects intelligent conversations over brute-micromanagement ability. </p>
<p>But seriously - among all the methods of having fun that teenagers usually engage in - the video game is the one that has the potential to be one of the most educational (with the exception of pursuing math/physics/programming for its own sake - which you can only motivate very few people towards). Writing and thinking abilities are often the most improved with such forums, because writing requires a prompt, and the online forum is the best prompt for it (it's interesting how much you can write/debate about a RTS game - a debate where people can actually AGREE on something - the rules of the game can be considered as axioms). The only problem, of course, is that it's much easier to waste hours and hours on gameplay than a few hours on game mechanics analysis (or writing/debating about the game). Hell, I know International Olympiad participants from HeavenGames (yes, more than one from that website) who didn't really analyze much the game much (they just played a lot and may have been better off academically if not for such games). So I'm not advocating playing games as most people play them now - I'm just saying that they can utilized in a more educational way if people designed forums that could handle such discussions. Only that it must attract a lot of people - and if those people have a choice between intelligent and non-intelligent threads, most of them will opt for the non-intelligent threads. :p</p>
<p>So, why write about a computer game when one can write about something more arguably useful? The types of reasoning involved in arguing about the mechanics of a computer game aren't much different from those required in arguing about other logical subjects (seeing that the game world is just a bunch of rule sets - and one must argue "which strategies are best given these rule sets, and given these game conditions"). Mathematics often helps explain which civilizations or strategies produce the optimal amount of resources in a given unit of time. And of course, 12 year olds can receive A LOT of feedback about their writing and behavior. Besides, it's an area where people are more likely to submit something original than an area where people have to re-invent the wheel MANY times, such as most academic subjects.</p>
<p>Of course, I'm somewhat biased, since I'm endlessly thankful for learning about CTY from someone at HeavenGames. :p (something that easily could have not happened if I didn't post a "my school sucks - does anyone else's school suck more than mine?" thread there - though specifically, the thread was on a forum of an online gaming clan that sprung off of that website). Most people do tend to hide a lot of their academic accomplishments. Shame for that, because I could have started prepping for math competitions earlier if they were more public about them (considering that the alternatives in school produced NO National Merit Semifinalists or people who cared much about learning). Though that's all an online forum based on a game, not a game. =P It could have easily been otherwise.</p>
<p>Oh, and some links:</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serious_game</a>
<a href="http://www.educationarcade.org/%5B/url%5D">http://www.educationarcade.org/</a>
<a href="http://www.socialimpactgames.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.socialimpactgames.com/</a></p>
<p>Anyways though, I see video games as impediments to my studying now. They would have only been useful to me before I turned, say, 14. Until I find educational-at-the-academic-level games in the future (and MIT still won't release its Supercharged game to the public), then I'll have to study without them. Heh, I did write a post about a connection between Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel", and Civilization III.</p>
<p>Lots of flaws may be found with the current communities as described above - I only gained from the gaming community due to my unique circumstances (unusually high motivation, nonconformance to school social groups, lack of knowledge about gifted programs). Besides, games are educational if you want to say, go into the gaming industry/analyze forum communities/analyze pop culture. =P But radical ideas are needed for change of any sort to come, so I don't think anything above is embarrassing. ;)</p>
<p>P.S: games are useless wastes of time if people play them as they are advertised on the game box (as they are usually played). Only a very small and selected minority of them go to online forums, and out of those who go to forums, few actually go into very thoughtful discussions about the game mechanics. AI-Scripting and Random-Map scripting may be the most educational aspects of Age of Empires II by far, and may be inspired by the game, but by that point, it's more scripting than gaming. The history one learns from the scenarios is at a very superficial level - perhaps enough for AP World History, but far less than the level needed for historiography.</p>
<p>Reasons why I play NetHack (to the exclusion of most other video games):
1) The Game Is Fun. Duh.
2) It feels like an actual challenge (so winning is actually worth something). Character death is permanent (you can't save and restore your characters if they die), so it takes far more than simple persistence to win the game. I've won perhaps twice in nine months. Many people take years before their first "ascension." One person ascended in a week. She was hailed as amazing. (Of course the drawback to this sort of thing is it's tough to introduce friends to NetHack, because it takes them forever to learn the commands, let alone be good enough to survive for a reasonable amount of time. But who needs friends when you've got NetHack?)
3) The community is splendid. NetHack's open-source, so there's a lot of discussion on rather nerdy topics like "what's the minimum number of turns required for an ascension?" Most of the posters on rec.games.roguelike.nethack seem incredibly educated and dignified. When they get into flamewars, it's usually more along the lines of witty repartee than an insult-fest. They're awfully generous -- they're always patching the game and offering suggestions and improvements to the "DevTeam" (all for free!). They're very courteous to newbies, and sometimes even answer posts that have no relevance to the newsgroup. (Not to say you should post those sorts of things.)
4) You can always find NetHack players in the IRC channel #nethack on freenode. They're somewhat less well-spoken (how well-spoken can you be in a chatroom?), but no less helpful or friendly. You can get people to watch you play from miles away.
5) Did I mention NetHack's open-source? This has obvious benefits (free gaming!), and besides, since it's open-source the game is easily patched/improved.
6) I need to have something to do with my life besides going on CollegeConfidential. Or actually working.</p>
<p>I'm warming up to ADOM as well, but the community is not nearly as friendly. And I can't seem to get a character past the early game, ever.</p>
<p>I play video games because they are fun, and more challenging than just sitting and watching TV. ;)</p>
<p>Video games let me kill people</p>
<p>I don't like video games. No matter how 'complex' it is, or how much 'strategy' it involves, I still find myself becoming bored and tired of the game.</p>
<p>The only game that I like is DDR. My brother got it (he's the typical video-game-obsessed boy)... I made fun of him for playing it... -I- played it... and I'm now hooked. I'm a beast at it, though. =) And it keeps me interesting because a.) you move around instead of just sitting at a computer, and b.) because I love music. While the music in DDR isn't necessarily genius, it's still catchy enough for me to lock into the beat. Oh, geez. I sound so strange =P</p>
<p>Escape.</p>
<p>I also kick ass.</p>
<p>It's cheaper than TV and no advertising. Plus, it's way more social than TV. What can I say, there's nothing like the rush of hunting people down and killin' 'em! It really is fun to get a bunch of folks together to play together. It's more exciting than board games, more interactive/competitive than movies, and it's faster paced than poker. Single player games and MMORPGs baffle me though.</p>
<p>I play because I like to blow people's heads off in Counter Strike:Source. </p>
<p>I play to relieve stress.</p>
<p>
[quote]
3) The community is splendid. NetHack's open-source, so there's a lot of discussion on rather nerdy topics like "what's the minimum number of turns required for an ascension?" Most of the posters on rec.games.roguelike.nethack seem incredibly educated and dignified. When they get into flamewars, it's usually more along the lines of witty repartee than an insult-fest. They're awfully generous -- they're always patching the game and offering suggestions and improvements to the "DevTeam" (all for free!). They're very courteous to newbies, and sometimes even answer posts that have no relevance to the newsgroup. (Not to say you should post those sorts of things.)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Wow, that's like totally awesome. Totally. I think an open source strategy game would be even more awesome. People can create different unit attack/hit point values and experiment with them. And this would be very math intensive - since you can't just rely on the gathering rate/villager second values that someone else derived.</p>
<p>Then arguments could go about with "which unit attack/defense values would make the game the most balanced between civilizations?" Of course, those arguments carry a subjective element to them. The problem with infinite changeability though, is that people need a common game ground to argue/talk about.</p>
<p>Maybe a RTS version of Robocode. Ai-scripting for RTS games is pretty difficult (and yields a lot of potential), given that the current RTS AIs really really suck (especially on water maps, since AIs suck at sending multiple transports to land - in Civ III, AoK, AoE, AoM, etc..).</p>
<p>People in Open-Source communities also tend to gear games towards more intelligent audiences (and audiences that want to learn more about the mechanics of the game: I want the option to read print outs of certain values of X within subroutines), rather than towards the public masses (masses whose other interests involve gambling, TV, watching sports, idle chatter, and gossip). The interests of those masses probably explain why the most popular games are now MMORPGs and 9999 Sims expansions (though I know some very intelligent people - International Olympiad participants - who are also hooked on World of Warcraft). </p>
<p>==
I also downloaded off BitTorrent a nice research paper about the motivations of individuals who work behind open source software (counterintuitive if one relies on traditional economic models). They're very interesting.</p>