No.dscross said:
School needs to be reformed to recover and to reclaim it from many of the reforms we've gone through during the past years or - depending on where you are - even decades. Gamifying has proven to work well for certain processes elsewhere, and we'll make sure to keep that in mind wherever suitable. Team A vs. Team B has proven to be a worthwhile strategy... always . I like to see it in schools - occasionally. Seasonally. Not as an agent of change, but a valued breath of fresh air. When it comes to global politics... not so much. Mainly because, right now, we're living through a shit show that threatens many amongst us - not with simple "change", but with existential threats that bind us, blind us, cripple us. We're hobbling towards doom, not just the usual certain death. We've been doing this for a century. We've been at this one for, what, fifty years and counting now? People died believing in this. People refuse to give up believing in it, as it would render their whole lives and everything in them futile, fake, false and without merit. It would turn their worlds upside down, all of them.
But, yes, I'd agree - games like the aforementioned Dark Souls can, indeed, help people train themselves to better themselves, to get rid of the quick, convenient exit or skip offered by the option to stop playing the game or hollering about wanting to choose the non-ableist easy mode route. See, we keep making up words to give our own mad ramblings some semblance of value, all the while devaluing and losing our grip on reality. We've gamified language. Look where that brought us. Do you like that? I don't.
If you want to grow open minds capable of handling living in the one harsh reality we got, gamifying cannot be a valid option. Look at the lost generations we've accumulated so far - we need to survive them before we can even think about growing wings and flying again. The sun won't stop dying. We're running out of time. Our eternities are nothing but borrowed time, and we're still very intent on wasting everybody's time. Not the smartest thing to do, methinks.
I find it peculiar that you would mention Dark Souls and Flappy Bird in the same sentence. I also don't quite understand how you could possibly call the Dark Souls series "strategy games". Maybe you don't do the Souls jig. Maybe you just made a hasty mistake, they happen. Maybe you could be nudged into at least trying to explain your strategy game category. Maybe you felt a bit too smart when you decided you could get away with sneaking a political discussion into the gaming forum. I don't think it's that smart. And I think you're wrong.
But, yeah, I'll be a good girl and reply to your initial question:
Why do you or I or others love rage-inducing games?
I believe it's about overcoming odds, solving puzzles, getting good at something that simply wasn't there before. Maybe it's about feeling smart. Maybe it's about feeling we are able to connect with the human being that created the problem we just solved. We are not dogs, games are not simple balls.
I believe that simply being rage-inducing isn't the only thing that makes these games - however different they all may be - fun, worthwhile, rewarding or inspiring.
But I have another problem. Maybe it's philosophical in nature. Maybe it's just a language barrier of sorts. I firmly believe that not everything has to be satisfactory to be able to give us strength, to inspire us, to allow us to better ourselves. See, the first time I "finished" a Souls game, I was definitely not satisfied by the events I was facing or the scene that was played to me. I endured all this and now... what is this? What did I just do? Why would they let me do this? Why couldn't I save the game before playfully trying out what now feels like the most horrible deed? Did I just ruin everything? I'm so done with this game... and then I started anew. Tried to do something else. I've been playing Souls games for a decade now. I'll stop when I'm dead. I don't like Flappy Bird. I don't get Super Meat Boy. I understand what they do and I get why people like them. But they fail to inspire me.
Souls games wouldn't work without infinite lives. School wouldn't work with infinite retries. The life counter was removed from Demon's Souls and lives stopped being a thing. They lost any and all importance. Instead, we focused on not dying because we needed to collect Souls. Every failure, every death made us retrace our steps - or give up. Forever, or just until we tried again. It tested our patience, making us try and skip, run, jump into the unknown... sometimes we won, sometimes we lost... everything. All those Souls - Souls of scripted entities that have gone before us, reduced to a dried up corpse, a glowing waypont that lost its shine the very moment we stole their life essence from them. Souls of foes we slay, over and over again. We need these Souls to grow our little toon. We need the experience to broaden our horizon. Every boss we slay is an experience. If we fail, we can just try again... right now. After dinner. Tomorrow. Next week. And once we succeed, once we understand, we can help others. Or, alternatively, we can cause the failure of others until we've figured things out to help us stay alive in our world... and grow fat from all the Souls we accumulate.
Life does not quite work like that. We can't allow it to work like that. There are similarities, sure. There are lessons waiting to be formulated, accepted and learned. We need to be forced to work for things that really do matter. If we get infinite lives, we lose the very concept of value for life, time, experience, each other, everything.
It would be chaos, and not the good kind either.
Are you an agent of chaos?
