General Discussion - Page 864

[1] Goalposts. I'm saying "games aren't, in principle, different from a spectator point of view (though some of them are more or less spectate-able than others)", you're saying "games and game developers don't have the science of impact psychology down like filmmakers do". Neither of these disagree.

[2] No, I apologize, I fell off some sort of truck.

[3] What I'm getting at here with you and this whole "gamers are all autists" + Show Spoiler + is that none of those traits you describe is a negative thing, it's just different. By even making the distinction and saying "why you only focus on the bad parts", you're perpetuating the culturally accepted idea that someone that is less emotionally intelligent or outgoing is somehow less of a person.

By going through life participating in this perpetuation, you are making people into stat pools. People are so much more complicated than just +EmotionalIntelligence ++Strength --Analytic, and shoehorning them into this framework is just continuing the cycle of everyone thinking that the iconic 1950s style boy that plays outside all the time, chases women constantly until he settles down, and spurns intellectual curiosity is normal and that anything that deviates from that pattern is somehow wrong.

[4] I don't disagree with this at all.

[5] I don't really disagree with this except I'd just like to add that, besides the additional complexity that comes with games like Dota in comparison to simple sports like baseball, people in our culture have been brought up their entire lives in an environment where the degrees of separation from "normal" sports is incredibly tiny vs. the degrees of separation from things like video games and fringe sports. In my view, this isn't fundamentally a characteristic of those sports themselves, it's just the saturation difference from the norms of the society we grew up in (norms which will change drastically over our lifetimes imo).

Ok. Anyone that's ever used a calendar to track dates and events would probably be incredibly impressed with someone who can accurately tell you what the date would be X days in the future without looking it up. Anyone that's ever played Tetris would probably be similarly impressed with someone who can play it in extremely fast difficulties. There's a bit of a bridge between that and acknowledging the incredible physical and mental control of someone in a high-level Street Fighter tournament, but it's not a bridge that can't be spanned.

[1] This is not a problem with the medium, at least in principle. It's a problem with combining technology and aesthetic design in a way that's psychologically intuitive - basically it's something the developer has control over. I mean imagine if there were no animations at all in the game and instead what happened was that a series of numbers were put over top of the characters in a code that signifies what is happening. The game is still "the same", the same things are still happening, the same calculations being done in the engine, the same results are happening. But it's less aesthetically appealing, it's less psychologically easing.

[2] If they made a Dota 3 with hyper-realistic visuals and well-formed animations, this could be pretty much the same case. It's the difference between animations vs. numbers, just taken to its logical extreme. I mean, that's the "natural" evolution of the gamestyle. Those little pixelized things we're moving around are modeled after humans and given human characteristics, it's just a matter of injecting realism and aesthetic design to bridge the gap between this and something like baseball.

Still the hyper-realism argument isn't really that important imo. The discussion is about making a readable spectator sport. It's the same phenomenon as making a readable user interface just in a much larger scope.

[1] That is an overly simplistic view of it. Check my comments to TheYango.

[2] As you say, this debate over "what takes more skill" or "which is more dangerous" or "which is manlier" takes place throughout every non-mainstream sport (and even the opposing mainstream ones are plagued by this). This is just another thing that games have in common with other activities, especially fringe sports.