tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5468631352102294695.post1643866011014358635..comments2024-01-18T01:02:10.807-08:00Comments on Story colored glasses: PeacefulCynthia Kurtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16185088323080774635noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5468631352102294695.post-4117561390689946612012-02-20T11:18:40.849-08:002012-02-20T11:18:40.849-08:00CONTINUED ...
I can see that my point about disre...CONTINUED ...<br /><br />I can see that my point about disrespect could have been put more clearly. What I mean is that pretending to be living in fear and poverty when you are not reminds me of "poverty tourism" and "war tourism" and "playing peasant". Most of the people playing these games and pretending to be weak with hunger have never actually been so, and if they had been maybe it wouldn't be so much fun to play at it. The reality of pain and fear is not funny or fun. I have never been in a war, but I have relatives who have been, and they definitely would not find it fun or funny to pretend to relive the horrors they went through. It would be an insult to even suggest such a thing. I used to think zombie humor was funny until I had given a few of my loved ones that final hug after they were gone. After you have been through that experience, the idea of dead bodies getting up and walking around stops being funny and just becomes unbearably sad. Nobody who has ACTUALLY experienced what these games pretend can see these things as fun. <br /><br />So what? Well, if we care about other people ... how can it be fun or funny to pretend to starve or live in fear while knowing full well that while we are doing this, somewhere in the world some human being JUST LIKE US actually IS weak with hunger or crouching in fear of attack right now? How can that be fun? How can it be funny? How can we ignore, or even laugh at, their very real pain and fear? Does practicing such willful ignorance - practicing pretending it's all made up - make us more callous to real suffering? <br /><br />I remember reading a story once about a woman whose children were starving. This was a real woman in a real place, as real as me or you. She said she would lull her children to sleep by boiling water for hours, telling them over and over as they cried that the soup would be ready soon, knowing they would fall asleep before they realized there was no soup. I cannot imagine being in such a situation, but it is all I can think of when I see the "hunger bar" going down in Minecraft. I don't want to pretend to be that woman. I want to help her. Because she is not a pretend person, she is real.<br /><br />Let's turn things around. What hurts YOU most? What makes YOU cry at night? Shall we play at it? Shall we have fun with it? Why not play a game where your beloved parent or grandparent gradually loses their sanity and has to be watched and cared for constantly? Not fun? How about a game where you lose your job and search for months to get half the pay? Not fun? How about a game where you are so desperate for human contact that you get addicted to playing games with strangers on the internet? Not fun? How about a game where you have surgery at 16 because you are morbidly obese and your heart is dying? Not fun? How about a game where you struggle through being a single parent with a dead-end job at 19? Not fun? If somebody played at the things that hurt YOU, would YOU think that was funny? If not, why is it funny to play someone else's pain?<br /><br />No thanks, I'll pretend something else, and when I can I'll try to help the REAL people living that REAL life instead. If we ever reached a point where NO human being ever had to go through those things, THEN it might be fun to pretend to be hungry and scared. Until then I'll use Minecraft as a place to build. Not a game. Not on those terms.<br /><br />Thanks again for taking the time to convey your insightful thoughts!<br /><br />CynthiaCynthia Kurtzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16185088323080774635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5468631352102294695.post-80621480372184207792012-02-20T11:17:24.608-08:002012-02-20T11:17:24.608-08:00lihimsidhe, thanks so much for your thoughtful com...lihimsidhe, thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. I'll see if I can respond to what you said.<br /><br />You say "if a difficulty mode changes a creature's base behaviour then this essentially makes the creature in question fake" - but the creature was fake to begin with, so a fake of a fake is .... a more complex fake, like a story within a story. That's good but ...<br /><br />What is real about monsters? Most of the "undead" fantasy creatures we play with today have their origins in historical misunderstandings of real medical conditions, so the reality behind all of these fantasies is usually nothing more surreal than illness and death. (Though in fact illness and death are plenty surreal enough if you think about it.) <br /><br />I am a monster myself. Some theorize that the story of vampires comes from the behavior of migraineurs like myself. Garlic gives me horrible headaches, so I avoid even the smell of it. So yes, holding up a pungent string of garlic WILL send me scurrying away. When I have a migraine I am extremely photosensitive, and bright sunlight can even trigger migraines, which explains the propensity of both vampires and migraineurs to prefer the dark. Because many migraines are caused by food allergies, migraineurs usually eat a reduced variety of foods, which might have led people to think they didn't eat "normal" foods. Also, anyone who spends a lot of time lying in pain in a darkened room (that's migraineurs before effective migraine medicines) will end up with pale skin. <br /><br />There are similar explanatory theories related to zombies, werewolves, and every other form of "undead" monsterhood. Catatonic epilepsy and autism account for a lot of the explanations: people apparently became "possessed" with seizures and automaton-like behaviors and even sometimes seemed dead, for what we know today to be quite "normal" and explicable medical reasons. Most of us know monsters. A friend in college had epilepsy, and believe me it was never funny or fun to help her get through a seizure. A cousin's child has severe autism, and she definitely acts strangely sometimes, even monster-like if you want to be cruel about it. So I guess being a monster myself as well as a friend and relative of monsters, this gives me a different perspective on monsterhood games like Minecraft. I tend to think about what the monsters want and how they feel rather than how best to kill them. And the idea of killing the monsters BECAUSE they are monsters ... scares the hell out of me.<br /><br />But what disappoints me most in games like this is the poverty of imagination. Surely we can do better than trot out the usual "us" and "them" monsters. Surely we have more to us than that.<br /><br />PART TWO IN NEXT COMMENT...Cynthia Kurtzhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16185088323080774635noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5468631352102294695.post-9364744321652850342012-02-18T23:49:50.761-08:002012-02-18T23:49:50.761-08:00lihimsidhe.blogspot.com
that's me so i'm ...lihimsidhe.blogspot.com<br /><br />that's me so i'm not a total rando posting here. anyways....<br /><br />your post is quite good in terms of quality, insight, and reflection. i honestly don't know if i would have come across the same perspectives without reading this first. to think that something as simple as difficulty modes would imply something as serious as genocide. that is kind of mind blowing.<br /><br />i also like your views on coexisting with monsters. either they just don't aggro you on sight or more interestingly, they have better things than you and it's up to the player to transcend or submit to their baser natures.<br /><br />however, i have some qualms. if a difficulty mode changes a creature's base behaviour then this essentially makes the creature in question fake. a zombie that wanders around a forest aimlessly ignoring you on easy vs a zombie that pursues you on sight begets the question:<br /><br />what is the real zombie?<br /><br />and if both types of zombies exist, then the whole concept of the zombie inauthentic. by employing such a method the world edges closer to the nonsense of what was seen in the 'day of the dead' remake with vegetarian zombies that refuse to hurt people.<br /><br />all i'm trying to say is that for your ideas to work in an authentic manner, there will always be mobs that attack you, some that never will, and some who have an aggro rate that is raised with the difficulty.<br /><br />that creates situations like, "i'm playing on easy and there has been a creeper hanging around my house. should i kill him or let him be (since he's not automatically going to attack me on sight)?"<br /><br />that creates more of a moral choice system than any game in memory has tried to replicate with their ridiculous moral systems.<br /><br />to make all monsters exhibit a peaceful behavior via difficulty isn't genocide, it's slavery. <br /><br />and my point of view is that of a soldier deployed in afghanistan. even after the revelations your blog showed me, i do not feel that engaging in virtual combat or violence disrespects me or the children i see out here. <br /><br />what i do feel disrespects us both are things like 'jersey shore'. but that's a whole other story....<br /><br />good read. take care.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06082416685624008655noreply@blogger.com