Spelunking the Universe
Posts tagged Video Games
The Importance of Achievement
8 months ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
Well I hadn’t planned to be updating this again. I wagered we’d all be standing amidst a sea of cosmic carnage as the angels and devils wage unholy war. So that didn’t happen, and I must admit that it was a disappointment for me at the very least. Does anyone know how to properly dispose of a body? No? Never mind, I didn’t say anything.
Now where were we? Ah! Achievements, I’m not talking about standing atop a mountain or running a marathon, but achievements in a relatively stationary hobby: Video Games. I strongly feel that this is a tool that is understated by gamers and developers alike.
Achievements in life, even on the miniscule level, are important. These create tangible or semi-tangible commodities that are produced through acknowledging an experience. The anti-achievement argument seems to stem from the argument that “Games did quite well without them for years.” I’m not so sure that they have not existed in games in one fashion or another for a long time, but even with that not mentioned video games have been constantly evolving for decades. There is almost nothing outside of the hard skeleton of the product that is the same as it was in the 80’s or 90’s.
The major advance in achievements in gameplay came with online databases. These provided a persistent environment for these accomplishments to carry from game to game. Where previously achievements in a game were contained on a memory card or emotionally on the disc itself they were now shelved in constant environment that all people could observe and thusly their value increased.
Pixels on the Screen. As some of players I know would say, this is again a very flawed point to make. A song is notes in series, a movie is a series of images, the images a collection of tiny spots of color in series, and the human body a collection of code and a set of base elements (again in series and patterns). We can take any component of life or anything we cherish and deconstruct it into meaningless drivel. It’s a flawed view and one that I won’t examine further, feel free to do so yourself.
If a person accepts any of the above content as valuable then they shouldn’t have much difficulty finding video game achievements valuable. These things are no less silly than trophies from sports or awards for job performance. In the end its an object that gains as much value as we give to it. The nature of society and individualism dictates that not everyone will agree on the extent of the value but holding any particular part as valuable and another as not is fairly dissonant.
Obviously there are negatives. Achievements can be treated poorly, constructed without good design and given out for trivial repetitive acts. Properly designed achievements can add enjoyable replay value, give players goals to rise to, and help them experience backstory to a game that they might otherwise never notice. It’s difficult and admittedly done poorly often (in my experience) but when done properly it adds another level of value to the game without much added investment.
I find it very unlikely that achievements will turn out to be a fad. They tap into an integral part of the human experience, creating tangible otherwise intangible things. Helping us, in a way, materialize a simple indicator of something we previously could not properly express. They can still improve, as can all things, but I believe the groundwork is solid.
Note: I realize that tangible is commonly something you can touch, but I suspect that most people will accept me broadening that to things people sense: Sight, Sound, Taste, Touch, and Smell.
There will likely never be a WWIII.
2 years ago
by Rico Penguin
in General
While I’m sure there is at least one snooty historian reading this. Not to say all historians are snooty indeed I like basically all of the historians I’ve ever met but I know at least one that is kind of a jackass. Anyways that bit a tangent out of the way lets get down to the meat of this prediction.
World War I likely had some events that happened before it that lead up to it. I’ve never really studied the first world war but that isn’t the topic of discussion today. People sometimes act like World War II was totally unseen and completely surprising to all parties involved. Indeed whereas World War I was terrible the second World War was absolutely atrocious. Events transpired during it that are the epitome of unbelievable. However it required extremely precise and special events to transpire for it to build to such a level.
You required a nation with industrial strength to hit a point of absolute desolation financially. This financial destitution really needs the extra bonus of being caused by a series of outside nations who are intentionally destroying you. Germany was essentially a wounded animal that was getting the crap poked out of it by a few other nations with sticks. Basically the world wasn’t ignoring it passively but actively. Making sure that Germans knew that nobody outside of Germany cared either. This set them up to trust anyone who promised to get them out of the situation. Now there are tons and tons of other things that happened as well and I’m sure I’m missing some. However it was a matter of taking a powerful nation and treating it like utter crap until it was nothing but tattered remains. The current economic ‘crisis’ really isn’t that impressive compared to the financial doom of the past.
Well most people know the gist of what happened during the second world war. Ending with the introduction of arguably the most feared weaponry the modern world has ever and may ever know. This added a new paradigm to future wars. It is now relatively certain that a new world war would end with something far more dramatic than the second world war. Anyone with the power to destroy cities doesn’t want to risk losing their cities and anyone willing to lose their cities doesn’t have the power.
The introduction of biological weaponry (the lab produced kind) we have another paradigm of possibly creating a weapon that has a global mortality rate in the upper 90’s. This sort of extreme event is a very strong deterrent. Indeed there is little reason anymore to have a world war. While the first world war marked the last great land grab attempt in Europe the second world war was an event brought on by extreme (for a lack of a better term) dickery. If everyone wouldn’t have treated Germany like trash after the first World War there is basically a 100% likelihood that there would have never been a second world war.
The sequence of needs offset by the costs of execution make any future World War extremely unlikely. Indeed everything commonly used now to support the idea of a future world war is merely a more active observation of events that have been happening for a long long time. The rise in terrorism has been the case for centuries, the rise in dissention and international conflict ahs been the case for centuries, and most other ‘notes’ are really more a case of efficient international communication than a sudden dangerous shift in global paradigms.
It is more likely that space will send us a global decimator than man will. At least in the next century or so. The old extremists are dying and the youth are less and less intent on following the suicidal nature of their parents. Which you can’t really blame them for, when all you had to play when you were a kid was beat the rock with a stick or paper cut-out GI Joes of course you’ll grow up to be bitter.
We have I-Phones and Video Games now, even nations that are labeled as ‘haters’ of modernization have high percentages of young citizens who are more or less infatuated with the cultures of other nations. It’s just a matter of surviving the current generation of leaders, once that is done it’ll be quite a long time before another great atrocity happens.