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What has Gaming's influence on you been?


McJobless
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The things we do and the things we ingest have a major effect on our development and our futures. My mother eating a lot of McDonalds when I was a baby set that up for me, as an example.

 

Gaming is one of the greatest, and most powerful mediums to date. It actually involves and requires participation from the audience, and most games have the goal of teaching you skills so that they can test your knowledge and ability, often leaving permanent marks upon us (hopefully good). It would therefore be quite intriguing to see how different people interpret how games change their way of life, as opposed to those without games, and given that this site is full of people who've likely been playing games for a long time (it would be very weird if somebody was here and wasn't a gamer, let's be honest), this is probably the best place to ask the question.

 

Thoughts?

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lol username

Well, I ended up getting interested in how they work under the hood and ended up here, and frequently doing my own 3D/game-related projects. That's been a pretty major part of my life I suppose.

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Shadowblaze

If I hadn't started playing games my objective in making music would be far different. Also works the other way around.

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I got into gaming via classic LEGO Games, unsurprisingly (the old-but-still-not-long-ago days when they could be found on a small stand at the back of a PC store), and after that period I thought that was all the games available to me until I discovered Steam through purchasing Portal 2.

 

Since then, I've experienced a variety of game genres (puzzle, multiplayer shooter, exploration and even "disgustingly-designed-to-arouse-anime-nerds" hack-and-slash, which I feel like ranting about sometime), gotten introduced to Source Filmmaker (which is technically built onto the original 'Orange Box' 2007 release of Team Fortress 2) and I've also learnt how to use Source engine's map creation tool; the Hammer Map Editor.

I've also had an interest in game design, which feels pointless considering my knowledge in such a field is minimal at best (other than a qualification in graphic design), but nonetheless gaming has had a significant impact on my life.

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Some people read for relaxation, some people watch movies, some people watch TV, and I just game. I rarely enjoy the others (in order: sometimes, next to never, and never) and gaming is my go-to hobby.

I've found that gaming is often rather quotable, and I tend to reply with quotes as opposed to making something original up - my whole family knows the Slimy Slug noise; it's something I often make when there is something interesting. Ooh, Ooooooooh! But that's somewhat rather of a piecemeal effect...

 

Actually, there is something kinda notable - FTL, the infamous rougelike where one random text event ruins your whole run. (Well, this is usually pretty rare (1 in 100 hours) and only ever happens earlygame. Anyway, that's beside the point). FTL actually taught me (and this is going to sound really sodding cheesy) that it's not what RNG/Life throws at you, it's what you do about it that matters. You know all those garbage essays you wrote about perseverance and discrimination in school? It took one indie game to do that what... six? rubbishy (in my arrogant opinion - remember my rarity of reading above) bestellers couldn't do. So that's something, and I joke whenever something happens "oh, it's just RNG" - because it kinda is in a way. Both good things ("A weapon is just floating in space!") and bad things (You detect weapons locks from an Anti-Ship Battery!) just happen.

 

On a different note, I've always been interested in how things work and how I can make them better. That popped up in War of the Ring, a ludicrously obscure Lord of the Rings RTS from 2003. It's ludicrously obscure because it's unbalanced as heck - there appears to have been absolutely no testing aside from "Does it start up? Good, let's release it now."  (Imagine if, oh, in LR the yellow powerup was always a cap-bomb (or magnetic trap or whatever you call two whites) and you could fire it forward. Also imagine that the AI doesn't bother using it.) And I recall for years thinking "If only I could just change the price of the Huorns... if only I could tweak this... and tweak that...." and then I discovered that even more obscure modding tools existed and now I am screwing around with game files (and hissing at HitpointsModifier and InterfaceUnitTextIDs, nasty pieces of code) - and enjoying it immensely.

AOE1 and LR were a different kettle of fish. AOE1 is superbly balanced, almost flawless. LR1 is also pretty balanced as far as a racing game goes - much better than Stunt Rally or LR2. Granted, the warp was pretty OP but the rest was pretty fine. Hence I didn't feel much of a need to poke around with those game files.

 

Also, to be reaaaaaally lazy, gaming is minimal effort for maximum screwing around. Working with things like real metal gears and gearboxes and metal and nasty sharp bits of wood is just so much more effort than double-clicking my .bat script to backup, compile, move, and run the game. (Automated find-all-and-replace-all is also quite good, too.)

 

I'm just a gaming hobbyist, really. It's a big hobby, but a hobby nevertheless. I'm still only at the first year of Uni so my life is still vastly unfolding, but gaming will continue to be a hobby and I can't really see it doing much more than that.

 

Is that what you were asking about in the OP? Oh well, you got this anyway.

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  • 6 months later...

It's helped a lot to get over big tragedies in my life. I think it's also the reason I may be addicted to video games. I have been working out and it's going good so far.

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Oh man. This is such an interesting question, and one that I could talk for a long time about. I'm incredibly interested in storytelling and the social impact that stories can have, and even more interested in the possibilities that gaming as a medium opens up in that regard. Games have the opportunity to allow the player to identify with the characters in a way that books and movies can't approach. While all mediums, whether books, or movies, or paintings, or what have you, all have their own unique facets and storytelling devices, games are so radically different, they open up an entirely new creative world. I'm sure there are movies that have inspired a lot of emotion in me and, for example, have made me cry, and books certainly have -- but so many games have done the same thing, and in a way that forces me to remember each and every one of them (Life is Strange, To the Moon, and The Last of Us would be a few examples).

 

And certainly, games have had a huge impact on me. I remember writing in first grade that I wanted to be a "video game designer," and now, I'm majoring in compsci and minoring in graphic design because I still want to make games. I want to tell stories through games that affect people the same way these other amazing stories have affected me. I'm interested in art in general, and the way art can affect people and effect change -- and games are an incredibly versatile and impactful medium that, in my opinion, is often not utilized to its full potential.

 

I also like blowing s*** up and shooting dudes, too. That's also fun. See? Versatile.

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Rock Raider Obsidian

Games have had a really large impact on my life. I think the most obvious way is that they inform the way I write novels. I started out writing fan fiction for Halo when I was fifteen years old and never really stopped, so, naturally First Person Shooters structured how I tell stories. All the novels I've written so far definitely have very video-gamey feelings to them, primarily modeled after FPS campaigns. Something I've spent a few years trying to get past are the obvious limitations of that kind of storytelling. It's been kind of good and bad. On the one hand, it lets me create novels without too much trouble. (Although I've slowed down considerably in 2017, for three years straight I averaged 5 novels per year.) On the other hand, my stories are pretty simple, repetition is a problem for me, and I'm probably not going to write anything high concept or truly good. Given my skill level and intelligence, it feels like 'somewhat above average' is about as high as I'll be able to realistically shoot for. But being a mid-lister isn't too bad of a goal.

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Hexadecimal Mantis

Video games affected me greatly. I played video games a lot growing up, and I always went the extra mile to understand how they worked. One thing led to another, and now I spend all of my time programming and reverse engineering stuff.

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I guess i always had a strong interest in games since i was young, though new games where often a rarity for me since my parents where pretty reluctant about buying me new games.

So that and my addiction towards the The Sims series over the years had made it hard for me to get new games, which kinda increased my interest in them and made me value what games i had.

 

Now days however my interest has died down a little compared to when i was younger since now that i have money to buy allot of games, it kinda gets hard to find games that really sucks me in.

I still enjoy playing video games and still think i will continue as the years pass, though now i want to spend time doing other things like art and video making.

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MineTimelapser

Games have been more important to me than I really account for, they directly or indirectly got me doing what I love doing the most. It made me start my YouTube, start animating and composing music. I always felt the need to do something with these creative urges (apart from mixing up all my LEGO sets) and without games it maybe won't have been the same.

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  • 6 months later...

Spent too much time on games obviously! Games + Yugioh TCG are addicting.

 

On a serious note, it got me more interested in programming and coding. Still trying to learn how to use blender and lightwave though. The LRR modding especially inspired me. Later I moved on to modding Empire at War, Stellaris, and other games.

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  • 3 weeks later...

For someone who grew up in a very rural area and didn't have constant Internet till Middle School, it encouraged me to have a good imagination and a want and desire to understand how things worked. I've always thought that the want to learn about stuff like that and understand how computers work gave me my love for chemistry and learning how small processes work

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  • 1 month later...
Noob Slayer

If games hadn't been a part of my life, I wouldn't be who I am today and that is the most horrifying thought I can think of

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