Are guns in video games holding medium back?

Surprise! I think the article is shit! It made no real effort to prove why its holding the medium back. It makes no mention of games like Deus Ex where you have the choice of being violent or not and how many people try to play the game as a pacifist. That article is 100% narrative and no quantifiable points. Truly awful.
 
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Sorry for the second post in a row, but, I think that RPGWatch should make an article regarding this. Would be so much better then that trash.
 
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I think it's got a good point. That dissonance was VERY noticeable in the Tomb Raider reboot. Cut-scene Lara was a fairly realistic, normal person. Then the cut-scene would end and she would run off and slaughter hundreds of people. It worked a lot better in the old games where she was shooting more bats & bears than people.

However, it wasn't so noticeable in Bioshock. The main character sounded pretty desperate all the time. That goes double for the first game.

Also, I really don't see this very often at all. Most shooters don't have much story to be dissonant with, really. Many shooters have characters that are part of the military and go in expecting fights.

Also also - is it even true that most games are shooters??

So I think it's got a point but it only seems to have one point. It will need a lot more to justify holding the whole medium back. Of course, if you were to change the title to be "Is violence holding some games back?" then suddenly the article makes a lot more sense.
 
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What medium? HDD, SDD or floppy drives?
Whatever. I have to disagree 100%, guns are irrelevant, it's different CEOs who make decisions. Blaming an item or a group of items on CEOs fails is completely retarded.

Wait... It's IGN? No wonder. CEO pays, IGN says 9.3/10 on utterly broken garbage.
 
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I don't know if guns are holding games back, though I am 100% sure they are holding back mankind.
 
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Easy way to avoid guns in computer games: Don't play the genre entitled Shooters. Use this one neat trick and you'll barely ever see a gun in a computer game again.

*multiple facepalms*
 
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They aren't looking to avoid guns, they're saying that games are trying to force them in and hurting themselves by doing so.

Let me see if I can put it more… diplomatically. Take the original Thief games. When you go through those, you have to sneak around and silently knock people out. You can kill but it's not advisable. Running in with arrows blazing will get you a loading screen in short order. What they are saying is that it's getting to be impossible to make a game like that now. You can make one where that's an option (Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid) but a game where you have to use stealth and patience, over and over again? No way.

Unfortunately, they try to say it's holding the entire industry back. That's too much, IMHO. It's the whole POINT of the shooter genre so that isn't being held back. It sure didn't stop the Serious Sam developers from making Talos Principle.

I can see it in a few games, though. I pointed out the Tomb Raider reboot. I've seen it in quests sometimes, too. It's like the developers suddenly realized that the player hasn't been in a battle for 20 minutes so they cram in a monster to fight. I can agree with this being a minor issue but I'm just not buying the scope the article tries to claim.
 
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You can find plenty of games with no guns, just like you can find plenty of films with no violence. Most of the big action movies, which draw crowds and make money, are action films. Most of the game equivalent are shooters or multiplayer shooters. So game producers have to decide if they want to make a crowd pleaser or a deeper game. Trying to mix is hard to pull off.
 
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Zloth said:
They aren't looking to avoid guns, they're saying that games are trying to force them in and hurting themselves by doing so.

Let me see if I can put it more… diplomatically. Take the original Thief games. When you go through those, you have to sneak around and silently knock people out. You can kill but it's not advisable. Running in with arrows blazing will get you a loading screen in short order. What they are saying is that it's getting to be impossible to make a game like that now. You can make one where that's an option (Deus Ex, Metal Gear Solid) but a game where you have to use stealth and patience, over and over again? No way.

Unfortunately, they try to say it's holding the entire industry back. That's too much, IMHO. It's the whole POINT of the shooter genre so that isn't being held back. It sure didn't stop the Serious Sam developers from making Talos Principle.

I can see it in a few games, though. I pointed out the Tomb Raider reboot. I've seen it in quests sometimes, too. It's like the developers suddenly realized that the player hasn't been in a battle for 20 minutes so they cram in a monster to fight. I can agree with this being a minor issue but I'm just not buying the scope the article tries to claim.
Click to expand...

What he said. There are plenty of games that don't involve weapons but if you combine sales numbers of 50 of popular ones you probably wouldn't get sales numbers of single Call of duty game. Guns sell and no matter how creative game is it will sell less than average gun port. So guns are not holding medium back, buyers are.
 
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forgottenlor said:
You can find plenty of games with no guns, just like you can find plenty of films with no violence. Most of the big action movies, which draw crowds and make money, are action films. Most of the game equivalent are shooters or multiplayer shooters. So game producers have to decide if they want to make a crowd pleaser or a deeper game. Trying to mix is hard to pull off.
Click to expand...

Pretty much this. Publishers are going to chase the biggest sales. Shooters and MOBAs seem to be where it's at right now. In other times, it was adventure games or platformers, and gunplay in games was relatively sparse.

Given time, another genre will take over as top seller. That's because of the unending cycle of lowering quality and over-saturating the market simultaneously. Most likely, it'll be another style that's relatively cheap to design and develop. I expect another video game industry crash eventually, given the patterns at play. But that's another article.
 
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