Agency in this genre is particularly important because it directly impacts other people in real life. Harsh words sent to a team member using the chat function are read by an actual human person.
HOW TO EVANGELIZE IN THE SIMS MEDIEVAL HOW TO
Players not only have the choice of how to personalize their avatars and hone their skillsets, but also make an array of decisions about teamwork and strategies based on the actions of other players. Grand Theft Auto V and Skyrim: the Elder Scrolls are other examples of this- if you start breaking the law in Skyrim’s medieval fantasy setting, be prepared to deal with a bounty on your head that makes it difficult to enter towns openly without being arrested.Ī third type of video game that grants players freedom to shape their own experience and make their own decisions are player versus player games such as Fortnite, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and Halo. Until Dawn, Sony Computer Entertainment (2015), All Rights Reserved.Īnother type of game that allow players a lot of agency are open world games, such as Minecraft and the Sims. Players create and build things within the world, making decisions that shape how the world works and the players’ experience of it. Small decisions made at the beginning of the game can indirectly cause character deaths much later on, resulting in one of 256 possible endings. In Until Dawn, a horror drama game, a group of young people must survive the night on an isolated mountain. Games like Heavy Rain, Life is Strange, and the Walking Dead are examples of this.
Some use the butterfly effect to create stories with multiple endings and storylines based on the actions taken by the player. Even though this agency is necessarily limited by the structure and programming of the game, it transforms the experience into a much more immersive, interactive form of entertainment than most other media.ĭifferent games incorporate agency, or the ability of a player to act and make decisions, in different ways. They have agency to affect the world in which the game is set. The players are not just passive viewers, but participants in the action. We engage with the story, but on a passive level where the only thing we really have control over is our reaction and interpretation of what takes place. We might scream at the characters as they make poor decisions, but we know that won’t change anything. Likewise, when we’re reading a book, we aren’t influencing what the author says or the events of the story. We are taking in what the filmmakers have already created. Agency sets video games apart from almost every other medium of entertainment or storytelling. When we sit down to watch a movie, we can’t change what happens. But something I find especially fascinating about video games is the aspect of agency, or the ability to take part in the game as an active participant. I’ve already written about a Catholic perspective on violence in video games, so I won’t go into that too much here.
What Makes Video Games So Special, Anyway? Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar Games (2013), All Rights Reserved. But I began to reflect : Do video games really have that much power over people’s actions? How much do they really influence us, and what does this mean for us as Christians living in the world today? The specific issue pointed out by State Representative Marcus Evans, who introduced the bill, is the rise in carjackings and their troublesome similarities to the popular video game franchise, Grand Theft Auto. This isn’t the first time that these games have come under fire for how they influence players toward questionable actions that are present in the games. Nor is it the first time video game violence has been blamed for harmful behaviors in real life. I recently came across a news article about an Illinois proposal to ban the sale of violent video games because of their harmful influence to real-life behavior.
0 kommentar(er)
