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Currently playing Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines, which has a level of sophistication in the moral choices which I've rarely encountered. Only similar game is KOTOR which was quite trivialized in that respect. Unfortunately this superior story game was badly let down by poor execution and bugs, and is only playable after applying numerous fan made patches.

Interesting ideas, Darren.
I am very interested in computer games, although I am one of those geeks who never really likes to play them... partly because I'm crap, partly because I just never really get into them.
I remember reading The Runaway Brain by Christopher Wills, some years ago, and a brief summation would be:
The pre-human mind, because of adaptation to changing habitat and changing diet, was given a great opportunity to evolve. On a high nitrogen diet and with increasingly more complex problems associated with the adaptation towards human, the brain evolved very quickly.
What he proposes is that the neural network of the brain relishes unique patterns from it's input. We see this with sound and taste - too much of a single one begins to reduce our brains affinity toward it and we block the sensation out. The more unique patterns we expose our brains to, the more complex the neural network becomes.
He goes on to assert that these patterns come as "objects" within a "class". So the pattern that causes us to see "red" would belong to the class "colour". He believes that such things as language, writing, music, religion, culture, are all types of complex patterns that our increasingly complex brains create and feed off. He calls these classes "Culturegens". Each one is like adding a new colour to our vision, but instead it is a capacity, facility or understanding, to our mind!
I believe that the pace of technology has taken us into many new Culturegens, and I believe chief among these is the culturegen of video games.
We no longer read a story and imagine in our minds eye the epic struggle of the central protagonists, we actually control them in a virtual environment we have created to externalise our imagination. We have embodied our imagination, the thing that has been at work for many thousands of generations writing great works of poetry, music, plays and whatever else could be imagined that would entertain our neural networks (blogs?).
I think that interactive fantasy (what computer gaming really is) is the greatest development of the human mind since the invention of distributed reality (tv for you non geeks ;-).

P.S. Is it me, or is the Meta Game a little too Hermen Hesse?

peace

I will send you a copy of Final Fantasy VII on the condition that you promise to play it (and you fulfill that promise).

Deal?

I've never played WoW or everquest.

good idea for a coversation, may have to get something started over on my Xbox community forums, thanks for the idea

Sorry you're debating video games and gaming without having played Final Fantasy VII undoubtedly the best RPG of all time.

Game design should have more entry level positions rather than expecting to get the cream from universities, great ideas have nothing to do with eductation.

"I've never read Ullyses (I started it....)"

Looks like you didn't finish reading the title...

does anybody remember "penis hungry dogs scatch my buttocks..." on the C64. Incredible.

Final Fantasy 7 (yes I dare use an actual number, much to the disappointment of square's marketing department) is indeed a nice game, but I suspect more than a little of its appeal arises from nostalgia. The story is very touching, but the actual gameplay typifies many of the weaknesses of the RPG format. Very time consuming and repetitive. Allow me to put forward Breath of Fire : Dragon Quarter as something superior. Short and sweet, with a true mastery of pacing that Square never seemed to fully grasp. FF7 could be likened to Tolstoy's War and Peace, so voluminous you feel intimidated into saying you like it, whereas Breath of Fire is more akin to Vidal's poignant A Search for the King.

I've never played Ocarina of Time (Shock! Horror!), but I am enjoying Twilight Princess at the moment.

To 10,

*GASP* If you have never played OoT, i strongly suggest you download it off the Wii's Virtual Console, if you are enjoying TP then you will adore this game, my personal favourite game ever.

I have never played Quake !
I find shoot 'em ups boring, with the exception of the half life series, with its gripping storyline, and online games where there's real people and banter.

Would anyone agree that the PC game Blade Runner is a classic?

I have never played a Zelda game. Nor a Mario game other than Mario Kart.

Shame on me.

To 12:

You should try some first-person shoot 'em ups which require thinking, not reflexes. Such games usually also have more involving storylines. Examples include: Thief 1,2 and 3. Deus Ex, System Shock 2

Single player quake is just the warm-up for on-line :0

On-line quake was a revolution! Community mods for quake 1 & 2 openend up loads of stuff. Counterstrike was a mod for halflife!

For me, when I used to play, half of the fun of quake 2 online, was the politics and the growing relationships with other clans and clanmembers. Always learning new skills, short-cuts and tactics. In a way, a more natural, non-linear, non-pre-designed way of levelling-up than is found in many RPGs.

In many RPGs, where I guess levelling up is the aim of the game, once you know how to level up, it just gets repetitive. A good story-line is the only thing that can then keep the gamer interested.

I have never played a Zelda game, Quake gave me a headache and though I liked final fantasy 7, I prefer other games.

I also have yet to play WoW,everquest and all the others (there are people in my student halls who do nothing but play them and I mean no sleeping, little eating and not watching).

(As a sidenote, my prefered games tend to be survival horror, with the Silent Hill series being a favourite to other more original games like we love katamari).

My point is that I am not saying these games are bad but there are people out there who hold these games very dearly and get defensive about them, more so than for films and art, and maybe this is why peaople are less likely to play the confessions game.

"I find shoot 'em ups boring, with the exception of the half life series, with its gripping storyline, and online games where there's real people and banter."

Online shooters are more the rule than the exception these days.

Both on PC and bxox live there are a multitude of online shooters such as Battlefield 2 and Gears of War, which have a strong community base, due to the implimentation of clans and the xbox live friends network.

Gaming is definitely a culture, I would say more so than film, because of the way you are in constant communication with other gamers; not just via imternet forums and message boards, but in actual real-time voice communication via systems such as Live.

Between the time I discovered Eve Online and the admission of collusion between a developer and a large alliance I never played another video game.

So I have a lot of catching up to do.

Currently playing Guild Wars.

Will never play World of Warcraft.

Darren's post about culture in video games is interesting. I hope video game culture is gradually evolving but it takes time. Games have always been tightly constrained by technological limitations. Not that this necessarily resulted in worse games, but rather the designers were forced to make games in a certain way. As PCs and consoles are becoming more powerful, games are able take more inspiration from other art forms.

Now that games can imitate and take inspiration from films, for example, it may start developing a more sophisticated culture.

Also, there is a younger generation who will grow up in a world with MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and probably push games in directions we cannot even imagine.

Relic's Dawn of War series of games are right up there from the old Games Workshop Warhammer universe. There's a lot of background to the scenarios which gives a good level of depth to the gameplay online and singleplayer.

I find FPS games really boring on any platform - so repetititve and lacking in subtlety. Half life series is the best iv played in this field but still falls short. FEAR may be better but iv not played that yet.

@Cydergoth

I to am currently playing Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and have found that, like you, the moral weight of each decision adds a great deal of complexity as well as depth to the game.

As with the patch situation, Troika (the developers of the game) where shutdown soon after release. Almost all the patches to the game are provided buy enthusiasts. Considering the latest patch is version 3.4, surely this speaks of the replayability and devotion the game has generated, not least because of that depth.

Is it me though, or are developers abandoning the single-player game with the rise of multi-player and MMORPGS. Something like GOW was very pretty, even if it was only Space Invaders, but just 10 hours gameplay from beginning to end?!

Currently playing Guild Wars and Viva Pinata.

Beta testing LOTR Online (dull, dull, dull)

Never played FF7? Shame on you, Darren. Go and play it now, lest I smite you :(

Your comments are well-pointed though. There aren't enough thinkers in games. Take the GTA series, for example. Where is the thought process? Where is the innovation? It's the same game each time, with a new coat of paint and new cars and sometimes a new city. Great... so where is the gameplay?

Major kudos, however, to Molyneux and his team of developers. They're taking a path less-walked into the world of innovation. I have a huge amount of respect to devlopers who put effort into the gameplay and not into the beautification of a crappy title.

"We sat down and realised what we really wanted to do was make 'wow' moments. We started to talk about what was important in gaming."

A quote from the article about Fable 2 on this website.

Developers need to think about what's new and exciting, not what's been done a million times before therefore it's a safe bet.

As for me, I haven't ever played System Shock ... I know, shame on me :(

Played (and finished) FFVII when it was first out and about. Great memories, but calling it the best RPG ever is very, very wrong.

FFVII had a very good story and excellent cutscenes, however there was very little actual character development involved - certainly almost nothing involving meaningful choice and effect, something that an RPG must have, eh?

In terms of best RPG, my top 5 would be as follows:

5)FFVII

4)KOTR

3)Baldurs gate2: Shadows of Amn

2)Vampire: Bloodlines

1) Planescape: Torment. "The daddy" - fantastic storyline, multiple paths based on characteristics, open-ended, great replayability, outstanding voice acting and above all - before it's time. Many of the best things about RPGs since were derived from Torment. It STILL sells and for a game that's eight years old it's not exactly cheap!.

I seriously hope that these horrid massively moronic online cash-cow games finally vanish down the toilet of gaming history and the true RPGs return.