LimitlessUnits.com blog of Tony Huynh, Video Game Designer

Posts Tagged ‘video game education’

Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Some of you may have heard about Roger Ebert’s disparaging comments about video games. If not, I will sum it up for you here.

“The nature of the medium [video games] prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship [however elegant or sophisticated] to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. For most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.” – Roger Ebert

Later, Ebert updated his opinions that games are art, just not high art.

“A year or so ago, I rashly wrote that video games could not be art. That inspired a firestorm among gamers, who wrote me countless messages explaining why I was wrong, and urging me to play their favorite games. Of course, I was asking for it. Anything can be art. Even a can of Campbell’s soup. What I should have said is that games could not be high art…” – Roger Ebert

This may sound blasphemous, but in a way, I agree with Roger Ebert’s assessment of our industry. Video games are currently not high art and they are an inferior medium to film and literature. I am not saying that video games can never be “high art,” it is that games have not yet reached that point. Video games have many challenges that other mediums do not have. Video games are a relatively young art form, are difficult to create, have to be “fun” and mass-market games have spiraling budgets, which cause a reluctance to experiment. If we are able to move past the video game industry’s self-imposed limitations, games have the potential to be the most powerful and important art form we have. In this article I will define what I believe “high art” is and discuss the challenges that the gaming industry faces to attain this important recognition.

Other gamers may challenge what I am saying by pointing to games such as Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, or Okami as “high art.” I would disagree. Stylized graphics do not make a game high art. High art is a work of importance. Works of importance are pieces of art that have cultural significance that include social commentary. Games as a whole are missing these key ingredients. Where are our games that deal head-on with themes like religious fanaticism, racism or the holocaust? While there are hundreds of films and books dealing with these topics, video games in the pursuit of fun and sales, avoid these touchy subjects at all costs.

Games = Fun
If you look at all the end of the year best of video games lists, what one word determines the placement of these games on those lists? Fun. If you peruse the talk schedule of the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC), it seems every other talk is based on how to make games fun. Being a game designer, the main discussion point in every game mechanic meeting is how to get the section of gameplay to be fun. Maybe all of this focus on fun is a bad thing. That possibility is just what Warren Spector discusses in his article; “Fun” is a Four-Letter Word.

But, the word “fun” has other problems. It kind of locks us into a “games are for kids” mentality. It implies that games are good for just one thing: passing time in an enjoyable manner, for want of a better definition.

And perhaps most damning to me is that all this focus on passing time puts a ceiling, of sorts, above us that separates us from other media, media that are allowed to strive for something other than simple “fun-ness.”

Movies, books, musical compositions and so on are – or can be – fun to watch/read/listen to, but there’s nothing in the definition or judgment of those other media that requires fun. We’re the only medium that says to itself, “This is what you must be and all you will ever be.”
– Warren Spector

The mandatory “fun” is what pigeonholes the video game medium into a escapist distraction and puts a self-imposed limitation on video games that prevents it from reaching the high art plateau. I recently watched the movie The Terrorist and asked myself the question, was that movie fun? The film was thought provoking, sad and even disturbing, but can hardly be described as fun. What separates films from games as a medium is film’s willingness to tackle difficult subject matter. In the case of The Terrorist, it chronicles the life of a pregnant female suicide bomber leading up to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. It is hard to imagine a video game based on the same subject matter. This drives home how mature an art form film is and how much further video games have to go to be considered high art. If we do not limit ourselves to games = fun, we could one day see video games encompass so much more. Perhaps video games could be relabeled as interactive media and we could then see games be on equal footing as films. We could have games that genuinely explore and tackle real cultural and societal issues.

Budgets and Sales: Willingness to Experiment
The reality we live with right now is that fun blockbuster video games receive all the press, accolades and most importantly, sales. Publishers make games to sell and games that tackle societal ills or are not “fun” are unproven. Game budgets are now commonly soaring into and beyond the 20 million dollar range and as games get more expensive, publishers are becoming less and less willing to take chances. It is difficult for game developers to tackle difficult subjects that may alienate or divide their intended audience of Western males age 12 to 35.

Here is an example of a game developer’s willingness to make decisions based off of sales. Seth Schiesel of the New York Times wrote an article questioning the Ubisoft Montreal’s decision to Anglicize the main character of the Prince of Persia.

“What are we to make of a “Prince of Persia” who talks and behaves like a 17-year-old American mall rat? A “Prince of Persia” with blue eyes, fully Anglicized facial features and what looks like a tan he picked up on spring break? Is it taking a video game too seriously to shrink in distaste from such characterizations?”

It was no mistake that the Prince of Persia is Anglicized. This was done to not alienate the developer’s intended Western audience. Yet the game gets a pass for blatantly disregarding reality, simply because it is a game. If we want games to be viewed as high art, we have to look more closely at our games and not take the approach that all that matters is sales.

It is this sales driven mentality and unwillingness to take chances that have placed a ceiling above this industry’s head and stymied the growth and acceptance of games by the mainstream. If we do not occasionally move away from the big-action-summer style of games, we will never reach that pervasive mainstream audience. Games may be expensive to produce, but so are movies and even large budget movies do not shy away from socially important issues.

The first step to having games be accepted as high art is to be willing to take on criticism and be held accountable for our decisions. We can no longer fall back on the excuse, “It is just a game.”

Complexity in Games
One of the major disadvantages of the video games medium is that games are very complex and difficult to produce. In order to create a mass-market game, it can take team sizes in excess of 100+ developers, each specializing in one of these four disciplines: programming, design, animators and artists well over two years. To a certain degree, independent filmmakers are on an even playing field with bigger budget film projects. The differences between a low budget independent film and a big budget film are much less discernable from the audience’s perspective than an independent video game and a big budget blockbuster video game. With film, anybody can pick up a camera and with post-production and editing software readily available, can make a highly polished mass-marketable film. This is not the case with the complexity required to bring a polished video game to market. It is much more difficult for smaller budget and more experimental games to gain acceptance by wide audiences because the production values between these types of games and games with much larger budgets are so wide and easily noticeable to even a casual observer.

Just as technology has made the independent filmmaker more on par with a studio production, I am hopeful that the day comes when technology closes the gap between independent games and big budget games. There are signs that this movement is already in progress with game development suites like Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s XNA studio. When independent gamemakers are able to remove the disparity between their products they will be more able to compete for the consumers’ dollars and it will empower our industry to push and experiment with new social themes and genres.

Video Games are a Young Industry
When film first took form, few would have called it a “high art” form. It took over a hundred years before it gained that distinction. Many parallels can be drawn from when film was in its infancy to video games of today. When film first appeared on the scene it was a spectacle, but frowned on as not comparable to live theater. The same can be said of games in comparison to films today. It heartens me that the video game industry has come so far and so fast on the technology front, but we cannot neglect our responsibility to our audience to move them to think. We cannot simply dismiss Roger Ebert’s criticism, but instead we need to take it as a challenge and use our medium to make our audience more “cultured, civilized and empathetic”. By doing so we elevate video games as a whole into the realm of high art. Games are a young form of media and in the years to come we will be given the opportunity to answer our critics and gain the respect of the mainstream, let us not waste it.

Conclusion
We are at a crossroads and must confront the self-imposed limitations we have placed on ourselves and start viewing video games as something more than mere escapist fare. It as a challenge to our industry as a whole to produce games that tackle difficult themes and strive for more than simple “fun.” Video games have boundless possibilities and are uniquely suited to surpass any other mediums that currently exist because there is a level of connectivity through open-ended and collaborative interactivity that no other media can hope to match. If we are willing to take head-on serious societal themes and not shirk our responsibilities, I believe we will see the day that the video game is looked upon as more than a way to mindlessly pass time, but as deeply important and socially relevant.

I would like to thank Amadeo Plaza for our discussions on this topic.

Tags: are games high art?, blog, Comparison, film, film vs. games, game design, games are a waste of time, games are not art, games are not high art, games as a serious art form, Games do not need to be fun, games opinion piece, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, movie, movies versus video games, review, riposte101, roger ebert, roger ebert games are not art, Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet, social commentary in games, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, Video Games, video games are a young industry, video games are inferior to film and literature, Warren Spector
Posted in Video Games, film | 21 Comments »

Gears of War 2 Through the Eyes of a Game Designer

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

I finally made time to play through the campaign of developer Epic’s Gears of War 2 and wanted to share my thoughts on the game. I will begin by saying that this post is not so much a review of the game as a slightly more organized version of my notes taken while I was playing the game. With that being said, there will be spoilers. Continue reading at your own risk.

Gears of War 2 continues the nearly non-existent story of Gears of War. The Locust horde has been sinking entire cities and steadily pushing humanity back. The game begins with humanity clinging to their last stronghold of Jacinto and the Gears setting out on a counter-offensive to prevent their last bastion from being undermined.

In the following sections I will outline the aspects, levels and events in the game that left a more lasting impression on me.

A nice lengthy starting video helps to catch the player up on the setting and events. This video is something I felt was missing from the original Gears of War and does a great job in establishing the setting.

After the video, the player gains control of the protagonist Marcus Fenix and can choose to go through training or skip it entirely. Training is handled in a very novel way. Fenix takes on the training of a rookie recruit. The player, as Fenix, orders the rookie to perform each of the game’s mechanics, before the player performs the actions himself. The advantage of this is twofold. The first is that it maintains that Marcus Fenix, being a badass veteran, does not need training.

The second is that as Fenix orders the rookie around, the rookie AI shows the player the action before the player has to perform it himself. For example, Fenix will bark out, “show me how to take cover rook!” The AI takes cover and the player is shown how it is done, before he performs the maneuver himself. If you want to see another great tutorial that uses the AI to show the player the mechanics and controls of the game, look at Lost Planet.

The first real level of the game takes place in a hospital and starts out fairly slowly on the action quotient. The interior corridor setting does do the job of familiarizing the player to the basic cover mechanics without a lot of distractions. The developers placed dynamic flat panel monitors on top of the desks used for cover. The well-placed monitors were often shot off during the firefights and gave the action sequences more movement. The other thing that I noticed was when certain events occurred that would bring you closer to an accumulation achievement, such as performing 30 Active Reloads, the game would display a progress indicator to show you how far you are along to gaining the achievement. While I generally do not go out of my way for achievements, I found that these indicators would dictate the way I played the game. I would purposely keep specific weapons in order to get the achievements. I have a feeling this will not be the last time we see this mechanic used in other games. Epic also replaced their collectible dog tag system from the original Gears of War with a journal collection that serves the same function as dog tags, but they also give the player additional back-story in text format.

The one great bane of developers in first and third person shooters is that when we place down scripted events, we can never guarantee the player will witness the moment because we have no control over where the player’s camera is facing. Gears of War got around this problem by inventing the third-person-look-at (Y button) mechanic. This ensured that players knew where to go and are able to witness the scripted events that the developers spent so much time implementing.

One of the moments that are keyed off of Epic’s camera look-at-system is later in the mission when the action moves to the exterior. Locusts have taken over the high ground and are bunkered in on a turret. The turret is just out of the range of the weapons you have been introduced to at that point in the game. Just when the hail of fire from the enemy turret becomes frustrating a friendly helicopter flies in and takes out the enemy turret. The Y Button pops up on the screen during the event and when pressed by the player moves your camera to frame the event ensuring that none of the action is missed.

Another annoying thing about having friendly units with the player in other shooters is that when they run in front of your gunfire, they always scream at you like it is your fault for hitting them. This is different in Gears of War 2 in that when Marcus Fenix shoots his friends he is the one that screams, “Would you get the fuck out of the way please.” This really makes the player feel more like the hero.

Later in the game there is a sniper mini-game that was so well executed you just had to smile as you played it. There is a squad of Locusts who are moving and at range. A conveniently placed sniper rifle allows you to pick them off. Once you start firing, the surviving Locusts run off the screen out of your line of sight, which adds a timed element to the mini-game. Marcus counts out each kill with the sniper rifle. This mini-game did not have any bearing on the story, but it was just a simple moment that tests your sniping skills and was fun. More games need to add moments like these.

The next fun scene was when you are approaching a shut door and without cutting to a cinema the door opens on its own with a loud audio stinger and a bunch of creepers burst out of it rushing the player. This is one of those surprise moments that make you immediately slam down on the gun trigger and flail your weapon around spraying everything. Experiences like these remind me why I am a gamer.

The tank level had the player driving through a dark tunnel with the only illumination coming from the tank’s headlights. After landing the tank from a steep drop, the tank’s engines and lights malfunction and shut off. For several moments the only things you can hear are Locusts and then you begin to see the iridescent glow coming off their carapaces creeping closer. Meanwhile the tank’s crew is frantically trying to repair the tank. This was a suspenseful moment and was just awesome when the tank crew manages to fix the tank just in time.

During the locust queen’s castle mission you enter into a room where the enemies are not yet aware of your presence. There is a flamethrower-wielding locust on the bridge with his back turned to you. Since the player has already run into these locusts prior to this moment they have already been taught that these locusts carry flammable fuel in their backpacks for the flamethrowers that blow up if shot. In this case, if you shoot his pack he blows up and the bridge he is standing on collapses in glorious fashion with him. Having cool stuff happen when the player shoots is great because it almost guarantees that the player will see it.

There are a lot of different enemies in Gears of War 2. They vary greatly from one another in both their silhouettes and sizes, making them easy to differentiate from the varying types of enemies. The lesson here is that when each enemy type is dramatically different in size and silhouette it helps players quickly assess the threat of the situation and decide how to tackle the different scenarios designers create.

Chapter four of the last act is one of the most enjoyable levels because of how ridiculous everything is. As the game progresses the action continues to ramp up and by the end it is just out of control. This level has you falling through the floors of a building. You survive another falling building, which lands on its side and then you ride an elevator sideways through the building. It is so crazy, but you are having so much fun it that it does not even matter. The level ends with you and Dom commandeering a giant Brumak and using him as a mobile weapons platform to wreak havoc on the Locust hordes. It is just the absurd fun you can only have in a videogame.

The overall design theme of Gears of War 2 was unique and fun ways to introduce and use cover. This is a list of the different ways that I can remember that Epic introduced or had the player interact with cover.

A living rock worm that is attracted to red colored fruits that hung from the ceiling that the player can shoot down to entice the worm to move.

Player operated switches that turn cover on and off.

Enemies that attempt to remove your cover through the use of these switches.

Pillars that fall and create additional cover.

Rolling destroyed cars into place for cover.

The Boom Shield portable cover.

Picking up injured enemies to use as cover.

The sheer number of different locales and art pieces for the game are also amazing. Just off the top of my head.

Above ground forest

Hospital

Underground city

Underground cave

River

Inside the worm

Research facility

Snowy Forest and frozen lake

Locust home city

Jacinto city

All of the settings were very different and distinguishable from the others. The amount of art required to pull this off makes my head hurt. The artists at Epic are simply on another level.

The gameplay pacing was excellent. There was an incredible amount of gameplay variety and the designers constantly mixed things up so you never did anything for too long. There were on-foot segments, various vehicles that felt really different from each other, and rail shooting.

As I mentioned already, Gears of War 2 keeps outdoing itself over and over and reaches a great crescendo. The gameplay is lengthy and there was more than one time where I thought I was nearing the end of the game only to find the story twisted and offered so much more. The greatest accomplishment for this sequel was that I actually found myself caring about and getting involved with the story, which is really amazing considering how little I cared about the original Gears of War story.

Finally, it is very fitting that Gears of War 2 was EPIC. There are explosions, buildings collapsing and helicopters flying overhead everywhere you looked. You felt like you were part of a bigger war.

Issues I saw and improvements I would have liked to see in the game:

1. Bugs:

The number of obvious bugs that the game shipped with surprised me. While none of these were game breaking progression stoppers, I just expected better from Epic and because of these bugs the game does not feel polished. During my single play through of the campaign I saw all the geometry disappear and all the dynamic objects including people fall through, my squad warping everywhere in my line of sight dozens of times and lots of floating objects and players.

There are noticeable hitches when the game saves.

I saw Dom standing in front of a sentry gun blasting away at him and he just stood there not dying or even reacting.

The AI on a few occasions got hung up on static mesh and just kept running into walls over and over.

The flamethrower wielding AI would fire their short-ranged flamethrowers at me even when I was 200 meters away.

There are no interaction animations when carrying turret weapons. These include the kicking of doors and using switches. It is just bizarre when you are wielding a turret and the doors open by themselves. A minor issue, but noticeable nonetheless.

2. When you are alone, which happens very often in the game, the reviving mechanic does not work. In these segments, when you are injured, very often the enemy AI will ignore you after you have fallen and you are forced to wait until you bleed out and die before you are able to play again. This is very annoying. A very simple solution would have been to kill the player outright if there is no partner in the vicinity to rescue them.

3. Having the pick up a downed enemy to use as a human shield and the dive for cover move on the same button is just frustrating; especially when you accidentally do the opposite of what you intend to. The controller mapping on this is just bad. When an enemy is downed X, Y, and B buttons essentially have the same effect (different ways of killing the enemy). The only different option is on the A button (same button as dive), which picks up the downed enemy to use as a human shield. Having 3 options doing the same thing is redundant. Drop one of these killing moves and replace the button press with the human shield option. This would prevent the player from mistakenly diving when they mean to pick up a human shield or vice versa by only having the A button for dives.

4. Seeing the scene through Dom’s eyes as he is reunited with his wife is very jarring as the rest of the game is told through Marcus’ perspective. When telling a story, you have to be careful of not breaking the perspective from which the game is told.

5. The voice acting fluctuates in the game from bad to good. The voice actors for Dom and Carmine are noticeably worse than the rest of the cast.

6. Lastly, how does your robotic companion Jack just appear and disappear into and out of thin air like that?

I have to say that I am more than impressed by the game. Epic really outdid themselves on this title. The scope of the game and the variety of gameplay in Gears of War 2 is mind-boggling. I do not say this of many games, but the sheer amount of content in the campaign alone makes this game worth the $60.

My thoughts and impressions of the game were based off of a play through of the single-player campaign at the Casual difficulty.

Tags: blog, Comparison, game design, game review, Gears of War, Gears of War 2, gears of war 2 review, Gears of War 2 Through the Eyes of a Game Designer, GOW, GOW2, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, review, riposte101, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, Video Games, videogame design, videogame review
Posted in Video Games | 5 Comments »

What Video Games Taught Me About Life

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

It seems like a week does not go by without the media putting out a report or hearing somebody say that video games are a waste of time and that there is very little value in spending time playing them. Despite what others think, I can personally say that video games have been hugely beneficial to both my social and professional life. I have learned first-hand many of life’s lessons from video games and I constantly draw upon my experience as a gamer to be successful in any goal or challenge that I face. Here are some of the life lessons that I have learned from playing video games.

Playing video games has taught me…

1: …to set goals and overcome challenges.
On the surface, the goals in most video games are clearly defined and easy to understand. When I first started playing video games, as I met the challenges of overcoming a level or a boss in a game my self-confidence grew. By setting goals to achieve and persevering to meet my goals I was learning the foundation of what it is to be successful in life. Just like in life, as your video game playing matures, the goals in games become more self-appointed, like climbing a competitive ladder or beating a game at its highest difficulty mode. With video games, I was given a safe place in which learn and grow and take on self-appointed challenges. I began to learn about self-reliance and being able to see the growth in my abilities and learning to trust in myself to accomplish my goals. The self-reliance and confidence in my abilities does not leave me when I turn off the game. It carries through as I set and meet goals in life as well.

2. …to fail your way to success.
Video games are unique in that they provide a safe environment in which to learn by making mistakes and failing. Thomas Watson once said, “The way to succeed is to double your error rate.” It is natural for people to learn by failing. In fact, people learn more from failing than being successful. In life you cannot be afraid of failing or making mistakes, otherwise you will never have the will to achieve anything.

Video games taught me that each time I failed, if I analyzed what the cause was and attacked the problem from a new angle, eventually I would succeed. Nearly every video game reinforces this valuable life lesson. Ninja Gaiden is a good example of this effect. Ninja Gaiden has relentlessly hard bosses and each time I failed and reloaded I tried something new and before long I started recognizing the weaknesses of the boss. What was happening was that I was learning by attempting over and over and formulating a strategy and executing it. I asked myself the question of “is my strategy or execution flawed?” If it is the strategy then I will have to change it, if it is the execution I will have to practice it until I can perform it sufficiently. In life when you fail it is possible that there are severe consequences, but in a game you can fail and the only thing that you have lost is a bit of time. The lesson is that if I have a goal, in this case defeating a boss and continue to learn from my mistakes and adjust my strategy accordingly I will eventually succeed. Life is no different, there will be setbacks and obstacles in any goal worth attaining, but if you learn from your mistakes and renew your efforts you will be able to accomplish your goal.

3: …to make quick and accurate decisions.
By playing a lot of games I am able to assess situations and make faster and more accurate decisions. This includes strategic and long-term decisions whose purpose becomes apparent multiple steps in the future. Video games challenge players to take into account the weaknesses and strengths of the tools that they have on hand and apply the correct tools to the varying problems. In the competitive team game of World of Warcraft arena, when multiple opponents simultaneously attack me (focus fire), I have to assess my surroundings and break their line of sight to prevent further damage, while staying close enough to my team’s healer to regain lost health. This positioning and awareness of my surroundings has to be coupled with choosing which defensive moves (cool downs) to use that will allow me to survive without going too far and putting my team in such a hole that we cannot later turn the tempo back against the opponent. The consequences for not making the correct decisions in a timely manner are dying and more than likely losing the match for my team. With the consequence of failing your teammates when not making the correct decisions, I quickly learned to improve my situational awareness and to make better decisions for each situation. In the workplace and in life, the fast data processing and quick and accurate decision-making abilities gained from video games are invaluable.

4: …that in life there are winners and losers.
Competitive games have taught me that not everybody wins and not everybody is entitled to winning, as most of the other coddled Gen Yers would have you believe. Winning in competitive games require hard work and practice. How badly you want to win and what hardships you are willing to put yourself through to win is a huge part of whether you win or lose. You have to persevere and put in the time and effort to continually self-improve to win any competition. As I previously mentioned, often you learn a great deal more by losing than winning.

Do not be a good loser. Be a bad loser. By this I do not mean be a poor sport when you lose, but when you lose it should hurt because it is the failure to achieve a goal. When this happens, do not just accept it. Take action by looking at what went wrong and analyze what could have been done differently to change the outcome and then figure out ways to get better from a strategy or execution standpoint, which leads me to my next point.

5: …that talent is overrated.
Talent can be overcome by hard work and deliberate practice.

Geoff Colvin details something he calls deliberate practice. This is different from regular practice in that it emphasizes relentlessly practicing what you are bad at instead what you are good at. I had unknowingly stumbled on this concept many years before reading Colvin’s article “Why Talent is Overrated” in the game Street Fighter II – The World Warrior. In my youth, I played Street Fighter II endlessly with a group of friends. Some of my friends picked up on the intricacies of the game much faster than I did. I was tired of being beaten at the hands of my friends and set about getting better at it. I practiced the game on my own time and refined my skills. I targeted the areas of my game that were the weakest. In Street Fighter II players would either start on the left side of the screen if they were the first player or the right side if they were the second player. The player on the left entered commands into the controller in the opposite direction as the player on the right. As I generally played the game as the first player, I could execute the moves very reliably when my character was on the left side of the screen. The problem was that on occasion the players would switch sides if your opponent jumped over you or threw you to the opposite side. When this happened I was a much less effective player as I could not reliably execute the reversed commands. I began only playing as the second player to practice the reversed commands over and over. By the next gaming session I was equally competent on either side of the screen and started to take advantage of my friends’ weakness in this area by purposely throwing or jumping over them to place them on the side they were less comfortable with. Through hard work and correctly applied practice I learned that I was able to overcome my group of friends’ greater natural talent at the game and that talent is indeed overrated.

6: …teamwork, communication and friendship.
For myself, gaming has always been a social activity to be enjoyed with friends. Cooperative and team objective based games cater to this almost exclusively. Competitive team based games, like first-person shooters and massively multiplayer online role-playing games place an emphasis on working with team members to accomplish team-oriented objectives. These games reward player teamwork, communication and cohesion and punish teams without these qualities. As a result, teams constantly work to refine not only their individual skills, but also team based strategies and communication. The lessons I have learned from playing team based games have translated directly into my team-oriented professional workplace. The ability to work in teams and producing at a high level in groups is something that holds true whether in a game or in life.

Even for single-player games, stories are shared between friends on how a specific scenario was tackled and defeated or recounting moments in a particular game that had left a lasting impression. Gaming as an experience begs to be shared. This is why every moderately successful game has a community of gamers who participate in message boards related to the game. In fact, the quality of the community surrounding a game greatly affects the players’ enjoyment of the game. One of the main reasons behind the success of World of Warcraft is the size and how enthusiastic the community for the game is.

I have had many strong friendships developed through gaming. All those hours of playing video games with my friends have solidified our friendships and we still retell stories about some of our greatest shared video game moments and continue to create new ones together.

Conclusion
I am not here to tell you that there are no differences in life and video games. I will be the first to admit that when taken too far, games can be a serious distraction from real world responsibilities. While I may be biased because I turned my favorite hobby into a career and I owe so much to games, I am relating my personal experience that there are some valuable life lessons that can be taken away from playing video games. The most important thing is to set the right goals. How do you know your goal is a worthwhile goal? Ask yourself the question of “why you want to achieve this goal.” If your answer is strong enough, then you know that you have a worthy goal.

Life is much more abstract than a game. There is no experience bar guiding and charting your success. Life is much less predictable and a definitive approach to success is not defined like in the game rules that are set down by a game designer. Setbacks in life and the consequences are much harsher, but games teach you to pick yourself up again and to strive for and to ultimately reach your goals by trying new strategies and having better execution. It provides you with a safe environment to experiment in which to fail and make mistakes. It allows you the ability to continually self-improve and to work together to accomplish what you could not do alone. These are lessons from games that translate into real life.

Tags: blog, communication, deliberate practice, fail your way to success, friendship through gaming, hard work, Life Lessons from Video Games, Life Lessons that Video Games Have Taught Me, life there are winners and losers, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, make quick and accurate decisions, practice, riposte101, set goals and overcome challenges, setting goals, Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter II, talent can be overcome, talent is overrated, teamwork, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, what I have learned from video games, What Video Games Taught Me About Life, World of Warcraft
Posted in Video Games, life, motivation | 14 Comments »

Tony Huynh Recommends

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008

If you are still looking for some gifts or something for yourself, here are my recommendations for games and books that I have enjoyed. I’ll be updating this list from time to time as I think of more stuff to include.

Video Games
Xbox 360 Pro Console
Xbox 360 Live 13 month Gold subscription
Bioshock X360 l PS3 l PC
Gears of War 2 l Read my review
Dead Space X360 l PS3 l PC l Read my review
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare X360 l PS3 l PC
Call of Duty: World at War X360 l PS3 l PC l Read my review
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core PS2 l Wii
Bioshock X360 l PS3
The Orange Box X360 l PS3 l PC
SoulCalibur 4 X360 l PS3
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn
Oblivion X360 l PS3 l PC
Psychonauts Xbox l PS2
God of War
God of War 2
Resident Evil 4 PS2 l Wii
Civilization 4
Chrono Trigger DS
Diablo 2
Starcraft

Fiction Books
Heroes Die by Matthew Woodring Stover
Dune by Frank Herbert
Legend by David Gemmell
Stardust by Neil Gaiman l Read my review

Graphic Novels
Blankets by Craig Thompson l Read my review
Sin City by Frank Miller
Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley
Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore

Books on Life
Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee l Read my review
How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey

Investing & Business Books
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch
Unlimited Wealth: The Theory and Practice of Economic Alchemy by Paul Zane Pilzer
Art of War by Sun Tzu
The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Built to Last by Jim Collins

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