Should games take us out of our comfort zone?

If there are no negative interactions, are there also no positive ones? Is it silly that anyone should derive satisfaction from actively assisting other players, with part of the enjoyment obtained specifically from the knowledge that they are helping actual people? And is it crazy that they would want to pick what form that assistance takes?

This is the short way of saying I agree with you, in part. Computer entities do not care what happens to them. This is not the same thing as saying that all interactions are meaningless and no one should have their own feelings about how those interactions take place. Maybe other players should "just grow up" and get over the fact that they got killed in PVP, but it doesn't add any more enjoyment for me to put them in that situation.

Frankly, I find your objection to my viewpoint on PVP just weird, like you expect me to go back to all the people I didn't kill back in 1998 and apologize.

There's a part of this that makes me facepalm.

Just because our avatars feel no pain and their "death" has no impact in the game world doesn't mean that there's zero investment on the part of the other player. Just because it's a video game doesn't mean no one cares what happens inside its boundaries.

Being defeated is viewed as a negative for any number of reasons, ranging from pure ego to loss of time invested (such as being defeated while collecting nukes or Shivans). People have varying degrees of tolerance for "loss" in this form. You personally either have a high tolerance for it, or assign low value to time or other resources lost. Not everyone does.

When you have people who view their own defeat negatively in this way, a player with empathy towards their fellow players will assume that those other players might feel that way and be reluctant to impose those perceived negative experiences on them.

I've assisted my real live team in Team Fortress 2 with my engineer many a time by building and upgrading a health dispenser, by placing teleporters from the main base to the front lines where the action is.

I've done many things to assist other people while PVPing in most games that have PVP. Is it crazy that someone should get just as much satisfaction from healing/buffing a teammate in a PVP game as in a PVE only one?

I never made the statement that all interactions were meaningless. As I said before, I simply question placing so high a value on 'harming' a player avatar in a video game environment. It's not rocket science that people don't like to lose. But I have to wonder about a person that would get so badly hurt by losing at a video game but won't have a problem losing or winning when playing a simple card game or chess or scrabble.

I salute your consideration for your fellow man's feelings. I just choose to look at it in a more practical way. That is. I like playing x game and it doesn't matter to me if said game is PVE, PVP or some combination of the above. As long as I'm having fun doing it.

That's entirely all in your own head. My 'objection' to your viewpoint is that I highly doubt most people who break out the peace signs and white doves whenever someone mentions the phrase PVP are half as pure and wholesome as they'd like to let on.

I'm repeating myself here but...I'm not talking about PVP in COX. I really don't think I could care less about it if I tried.

Its a broken system that really would be better off not being in this game. (My personal POV)

I am, and have always been discussing PVP as a conceptual whole. The entire idea of competing against another human being(s) in any genre and platform of video games.

You know its interesting that there's no shortage of peace-loving, hand-holding people ready to stand up and state how horrible an impact PVP can have on someone's life. I tend to wonder if those same people never have spiteful or hateful feelings towards family members. They never say harsh things to their significant others. Never cheat. Never wrong their children or fellow workers. Always turn the other cheek in any conflict and live perfect little lives with nary a bad word being said about them by any one.

And if that isn't the case, where do they possibly find the leeway to be horribly offended by the possibility of maybe hurting someone in a multiplayer game who's design is to have teams/individual players compete against each other?

You seem to be incapable of understanding this, so I will say it one last time:

Video games are not real life. Video games are pretendy fun time. People don't want the stuff they don't like in real life but have to deal with because it's real life to carry over into their pretendy fun time.

For the record, I have no problems with PvP. I don't like PvP here post I13, and I wasn't interested in it particularly even before then (I just thought it was more fun). Before I played CoH I spent about 5 years playing highly competitive league and ladder tournaments in FPS games. So don't think I have some sort of axe to grind against the mere concept of PvP.

Strawman representation of the position. Nice people do bad things all the time, in the heat of the moment or due to lack of personal will. People can love and mean well for their family or friends and do the wrong things to or for them, because people aren't perfect. That doesn't mean they can't spend most of their time trying to be considerate of others and doing things they think others will like or at least won't hate.

More strawmen. There's a difference in doing what one considers polite and avoiding "horrible offense". This isn't about knuckle-biting fear that someone will be horrified that you did something in a video game. It's about realizing that not all other people enjoy it (particularly easy to imagine when the person doesn't like it themselves), so why run around doing it?

This isn't my own philosophy, but even though it's not how I choose to engage people (at least in this game), I do at least understand it.

Then you missed the point. Tony's comment to me was that I was complaining about Incarnates. I was not. In fact, this isn't a complaint thread at all. Simple as that. I'm interesting in discussing game design philosophies an people's takes on them, and to no-one's surprise, so far Arcana has come the closest to a professional take on the subject matter and a great many other people have shared quite interesting personal takes on it.

What I'm really not interested in is discussing other people's characters, rights to have specific motivations or, really, takes on current hot-button topics. It helps nothing and brings only animosity.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Sometimes it's a bit complicated to follow your qualitative terms like "some," but I think I'm on the ball this time

What you say seems like a pretty solid, no-nonsense approach to designing a decent game. I don't think anyone here is (or has any right to be) under the illusion that such game exists as to never upset or irritate any of its players. No matter how niche a game is, no matter how few people actually play it, SOMETHING will begin to irritate SOMEONE, if for no reason other than because tolerances for irritation drop as the frequency of irritation decreases. Something about the game will be outside of someone's comfort zone, and pretty much at all times. I'm not sure if that's a provable assertion, but I'm not sure it's a disprovable one, either.

All of that said... I'm not sure if I agree with your take on the necessity for meaningful choice. I don't specifically disagree with it, but it's a novel way to think about things (for me), so I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to have choice be meaningful, and to make players feel like their decisions matter. It's how our brains are programmed to perceive the world. It's how we survive and thrive. On the flip side, I would be lying if I denied the alluring nature of choice without consequence, to which the greatest evidence would be our costume editor, and the "controversy" around unlockable costume piece.

The City of Heroes costume editor is probably one of the best character design tools in any game out there (possibly excluding Second Life, which I'm reluctant to call "a game"), and almost the entirety of it has absolutely no consequence attached to it. You want to wear a bikini and deflect bullets with your solar plexus? You can. You want to strap two 50 gallon oil drums to your forearms, fill them with concrete and still jump half a mile straight up? Go right ahead. You want to swing a rusty piece of angle iron and cut armour-plated vehicles to ribbons with it? Sign me up! It's the segregation of consequence - as derived from a collection of mostly meta-game decisions - and cosmetics - as derived from a system with NO functional consequence - is probably one of this game's greatest strengths.

And yet despite the complete lack of consequence, we still have people (myself among them) agonising over even slight details of their costume designs, such as "Do I make the tie red or should I leave it white?" "Should I use two different-coloured Talsorian Broadswords or should they be the same colour?" It doesn't matter, because none of the above has any consequence in actual practice. It doesn't matter if your sword is green or blue or yellow and whether it is made of metal or plastic or silly putty or out of pure energy. It still cuts the same, but you can cut the same AND look however you like.

This is kind of the stance that I'm coming from, and I'd lie if I said City of Heroes itself wasn't a large part of why I feel this way. So in light of this... I honestly can't say how I feel about your feeling of the need for choices and consequences. I'm more inclined to agree with you, however, as historically you've always had the capacity for much broader perspective than me, and there is, as you say, very likely a necessary balance between cosmetic choices and real choices. And when it comes to real choices, there is no way of avoiding such that have consequences which push people out of their comfort zones no matter what they pick. It's kind of like Virgil Tarikoss asking you "You are either bold or stupid. Which is it?" Your only allowed answer is "Stupid." Ironically, it does make me feel stupid for choosing it.

I guess the part where we do agree - or seem to, and correct me if I'm wrong - is that game designers should accept the fact that no matter what they do, they WILL push some people out of their comfort zones, and that they should not be afraid to do so in the name of designing a decent game. On the flip side, I don't get the feeling from your posts that you support the notion that players NEED to be pushed out of their comfort zones, that discomfort in itself is a desired consequence and somehow adds to the game experience, and that players don't know what's good for them. Which I like, and in which I trust we agree.

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The only thing I'll say to this tangent of the conversation (other than stating my agreement with the above quote), is that whether everyone can intrinsically understand it or not, not all people enjoy competition with other people. That's really all it comes down to. Yes, I, myself, have competed in the past, and for a variety of reasons, none of them my own choice.

Many years ago, I lost the desire to prove I'm better than other people and to "best" other people, largely because I lacked the ability to. These days, I do have the ability to do so, but the desire for it just no longer exists. Being "better" than others just holds no meaning for me. Being good at what I do still does, but this does not require competition to achieve.

And I'm not speaking on principle here. I work as a tech expert at a faculty of biology, where most of my colleagues are almost entirely computer-illiterate. I COULD point out how much more than them I know, but I feel no need to do so, because there's nothing to be gained from it, and because I feel like a right jerk for even contemplating it.

The rewards for competition hold no value for me, and the act of competing is not fun. As such, I choose to play games in my spare time where I don't have to compete. Because even when I win, I can't help but think what it must be like for those poor sods I'm dominating, having been in their shoes last time. A competition that has winners must also have losers, and just as I don't want to lose, so I don't want other people to be losers, either. It mars the experience, and I see no gain to be had in it. Not for me.

That's all it comes down to.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

rise from your graves!

They should, because this is a legitimate question. In fact, I can name at least two movies that put a LOT of people out of their comfort zones: Saw (and its spawn) and the Human Centipede. Dubbed "murder porn," these are certainly not for everybody. More personally, I myself have written a story that the people I showed it to have told me was too dark and unpleasant for them to read, and asked me to either fix that in upcoming chapters or stop writing it, paraphrasing, of course.

However, when it comes to movies and especially books, there's a much broader field to choose from. When it comes to games, this isn't always the case. Of course, looking at Steam and its vast library of indie games, the choice appears much more vast, as for every mainstream game you've heard of on it, there are ten you didn't know existed, and some of those ARE disturbing and trying to take you out of your comfort zone. Amnesia: The Dark Descent comes to mind, though I happen to not share popular opinion on the subject.

This isn't a question about whether games COULD take us out of our comfort zone. They clearly could, as evidence to this exists all over the genre. It's a question of whether they SHOULD, in the sense that "true art is offensive" and any game which doesn't push people out of their comfort zone and "broaden their horizons" cannot be seen as true art. I believe it's safe to say that it's an accepted objective for every game ever made to be good. No-one invests money into making a game while deliberately trying to make a crappy game. Should we consider a game's tenacity in reshaping its players' minds to be just obvious an objective, or can we postulate that not all games need to be like this, and that it's perfectly OK for some games to cater to what players want to do anyway, rather than trying to "inspire" players to do something new or something they're uncomfortable with?

This question is most relevant to MMOs, because they're some of the broadest games ever made, at least in terms of the variety of activities they present. There's the social side, the combat side, the tinkerer side, the explorer side, the collector, the achiever side and so on and so forth. It's logical that the more aspects of an MMO a player is involved in BY CHOICE, the more of an investment said player will have in the game. I feel it is also true, however, that the more aspects a player is FORCED to involve himself in, either by coercion or system limitation, the worse off this is for the player's experience.

But that's just my opinion. I made the thread to hear other people's stances. If it's still alive, then I hope that it can still deliver that. And not get locked

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.