Disagree. Your opinion is very closed-minded.

Games arent meant to be real, they are meant to mimic and simulate the real to create the best gaming experience; This 'experience' has obviously been found to be one which has life-like characteristics and is designed to evoke emotions and logical thought processes alike to involve the user in the game.

As regards mockery of real life, how could you be more wrong. The way things are portrayed in games are designed to be as realistic as possible, hence, it should make the most accurate learning tool. As you have mentioned 'cancer' we shall look at that: In a game other characters react to the one who is ill by worrying about them. Now for the user who, say, has not known anyone with cancer, they are educated and learn about the way people behave and how serious a thing it is.

Disagree.

This is where suspension of disbelief comes into play. Sure, the games may not be as realistic as they could be; the characters don't have perfect reactions to everything, and are often scripted, and many items don't work as you'd expect them to in the real world. But by making the game world consistent at least within itself and attempting to make an immersive experience, we allow players to suspend thier disbelief.

Have you ever seen someone playing an arcade beat 'em up game? They typically say things like "aww man, I was so close, but then he totally kicked my butt", or "I nearly died, but then I pulled off a totally awesome move". These players are clearly identifying the characters actions as thier own; they know they're playing a game, and the characters often don't even try to be realistic, and yet players believe in them for the duration of the game in a fashion. They suspend thier disbelief, and during the time they play the game, they are that character. This can of course be disrupted by bad controls, or by something that doesn't fit in, but those are all things to be kept in mind when designing the game.

In the end, you can choose to believe in a character just as much as you believe that the 'real' people in front of you exist; you don't really have anything to prove it, you just believe it, because the world you are in is immersive enough that it effectively suspends your disbelief.

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Original post by sunandshadow Disagree! - The power to turn abstraction into a meaningful story that connects with your emotions is largely in your head, not in the various entertainment media. I remember being 12 or so and creating vivid stories with just some plastic horses, building blocks, and scraps of cloth. In historical times, people looked with awe and fear at heiroglyphs, petroglyphs, and murals that just seem clumsy to us today because we are not taught as children to read their symbolism and revere their style. Modern Graffiti that seems like meaningless scribbles to an outsider can hold a lot of meaning and emotion for an audience used to interpreting the conventions of that style. Look at the amazingly powerful stories South Park manages to create with construction-paper cut-outs. Characters in games are at least as real as characters in South Park, or an anime, or a live-action movie, or a novel. (Which are, after all, pre-created linear paths created by entertainers.)

Very well said; games require you to engage your imagination to a certain extent, just like any other form of entertainment media.

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Original post by Riviera Kid By any chance are you one of those crazy people that thinks tv is real?

No but I can suspend my disbelief much easier because humans are generally better actors!

I disagree.

I dont want to play a game where some one dies, and then a few seconds later they are back cause they have an "Extra guy" I personally can immerse myself to play as a character, and not see myself as a guy sitting behind a joystick giving commands to a guy with a suit of armor, I can kinda feel for characters, I try to play as a character, I dont force my personality on the characters I play. I just leave my own character behind, and visit fictional worlds that games have within them.

I had a more drawn out responce, but the computer im useing crashed so I didn't get to post it.

I'll agree with that, to an extent. Capcom, for instance has some of the worst voice acting and scripting I've ever heard. It's awful, and it actually hurts my immersion. I'm playing this scary survival/horror game, and suddenly there's a cutscene, and I'm watching a goofy buddy movie, with awful grammar and wooden reading of lines. It's painful. I actually left the room at the end of Devil May Cry, because the dialogue in the plane was so poor, it hurt.

But you know, watching some of those old Hollywood movies from the forties has about the same effect. Maybe it's just growing pains for the industry.

Edit: But Halo 2 was terrific. Everything from the cutscenes to the in-game voice acting to the AI responding to the guns I swapped with them made me feel like I was right where I wanted to be. What a great experience that game was.

I agree with all the "I disagree's" above, but I just have to point out that some games have done what Ketchaval has suggested. Metal Gear Solid and MGS2 come to mind. There's the scene in MGS2 where Snake insists he has plenty of ammo for both himself and you because of the "unlimited ammo" bandana he's wearing that he got from the first game. Or how in the first game you'd be asked to put the controller on your arm so the vibration could massage your/Snake's sore muscles. Or how you're told you need to look on the back of the game box to get one of the communication channels you need (this was used in the original Metal Gear game on the NES, too.) Anyway, the games were littered with casual references to itself as a game, and yet at the same time, the game carried itself with as real a sense of realism as any movie. I thought this stuff was hilarious, and I think a game that can make fun of itself in this way would be really cool.

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Original post by Ketchaval Games trivialise almost everything that they come into contact with, because as of yet A.I and acting isn't anywhere near developed enough to suck you in and have you believe that what you see is anything beyond a preprogrammed routine set up by the developers.

Aside from what's been said above, I think only game developers suffer this problem. I've unfortunately managed to sour my hardcore gaming friend's immersion by pointing out pathfinding bugs or trigger responses. Until then, he was quite happy thinking that a Terran marine who got stuck was "standing his ground and going out like a soldier!"

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If an in-game person is ill, with cancer they don't suffer and any pretence that they do is just a hollow act. and a mockery of people who are suffering in real life.

This is a bit overrought, don't you think? Even if you're absorbed in the best book or movie you can, if you consciously choose to disengage, see that it is all hollow. In Amistad, that isn't REAL blood that spatters Cinque's face; nor is that really adipose layers of fat hanging out of the wounds of Jesus in Passion of the Christ. The soldier on the beach in Normandy isn't REALLY carrying around his own limb in Saving Private Ryan. Nevertheless, the scenes don't mock what is portrayed.