philosophy Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

Reasons to Keep Playing

Posted on September 24, 2023September 25, 2023 by Viljami

As I was growing up video games really made me feel like a hero. There was this combination right in front of my eyes of technology and excitement that made my imagination go wild. I remember how graphics looked like and in my mind they are hugely exaggerated. I can understand this today when I look at any NES game that I witnessed back then. My mind plays tricks on me and I just can’t make it stop even if I wanted.

Of course there has to be a balance in life in overall. You don’t want to play all your life as you don’t also want to be working or studying all the time. You have to keep yourself exercising enough and eating well so you stay healthy and also live a good life. There are many sides to life. And there are so many things you can do.

What brought me to gaming was the technology and also the entertainment that it offered. While I was a kid I started to learn things also in school. I was good in mathematics. When I was maybe nine or ten I figured that I wanted to be an engineer. They had to utilize mathematics to develop technical devices. Soon I found out how video games basically were made. They were constructed with a programming language. There are many other things about how games are made also, like generating graphics, composing music and sound effects among many other things, but this programming stuff seemed interesting to me at that moment.

So I am a kid that is good at maths and likes to play video games. Video games are made with a programming language. This is what made me to think that I would like to create games. I wanted to be able to create all these amazing worlds and characters and plots and schemes that I had stumbled on while I was playing video games. This is what sparked my mind and made me feel interested towards mathematics and computer science.

Now that I have already some knowledge of programming I can say that it necessarily doesn’t require a high level of understanding of mathematics. You can definitely start programming even if you are bad at maths. I have to say that nowadays there are many tools for you if you don’t like writing code. There are many game development engines that you can use. And there are also many other areas in game development besides pure programming.

How can games develop you? You definitely get some training with your motor skills. You get this sense of how what you are doing with your hands is affecting what you are seeing ans that is happening in front of your eyes. Of course when you are young your motors are stronger and keep developing faster than when you are older. You are watching something that is happening. This develops your visual sense and even your three-dimensional comprehension. When you are young these skills that I mentioned are fast to develop.

I also have to say that I learned a lot of English from playing video games. You are right now reading this text that I have written fully in English. I am a native speaker of Finnish. I have learned English in school and in my spare time reading and writing and to some extent even speaking. I haven’t studied or worked in any other country besides my home country. So, this is how I got started with my English. I am still trying to learn it today. No one is perfect.

Games are also very entertaining. When PlayStation was released it took only some years for video games to become also popular amongst young adults. Today people of every age are playing. There is just so much more that games can offer when compared to music, books or movies. I am not saying that games are better. I think they are different.

Can you learn programming through playing video games? I think you can learn some game design but you don’t directly learn it with playing. You need to study some programming to actually get to a level that you can achieve something as technically challenging as making a whole video game. Knowing how to program can give you some deep insight of how games are working. I have learned to understand more about games and what happens in the code and see it also while I am playing.

There are some reasons to not to spend all of your time playing video games. There are also other things in life besides games. You definitely have to keep doing your work or keep studying. You have to take some responsibility. You also have to eat and exercise to keep yourself happy and healthy. You can in a way be addicted to playing games. This addiction is very different from a drug addiction that deals more with a chemical addiction. If you can’t do anything else in your life you can actually be addicted also to games. Basically you are then addicted to your own habits and you might need to prioritize your life again. And I know that very few people are actually addicted to video games. There are way more people understanding the balance in life than there are people addicted to gaming.

There was a story about a guy that played a video game for several moths continuously. What happened to him is very sad. He lost his wife, job and basically all of other things in life that he had. This is what can happen. But I must stress that this is very rare and people tend to understand everything that they have in life and they want to maintain their physical and mental health,

If you are feeling that you have had enough of video games you can try to center your focus on to some other things. You can read a good book. Go do some exercise. Have a nice conversation with someone you like or someone you love. Watch a movie or a series. Do some work or study and don’t forget to eat and do it also as healthy as you can.

Simulation vs. Reality

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Viljami

I was playing Dirt 4 as this idea entered my deeply focused mind. As you might know, as a gamer and reader of this blog, Dirt 4 is a rally game that has said to be somewhere in between a simulation and a totally arcade type of driving game. Of course I am once again playing with a game pad instead of a driving wheel. So, that makes it more of an arcade style of play. But what I actually wanted to represent and deal with this blog post is that how can playing something, be it simulation or not, to actually give you a perspective on how to approach a skill or some activity in real life and in reality?

Games can give you an idea of something, for example driving a car. This activity is not real driving. It is something a bit similar. Of course there are no risks. If you would really actually drive a car over 160 kilometers an hour on a road somewhere in the shore of lake Saimaa, Finland, you would have to really have some skills and know-how to even operate the car. There is this thought of driving and kind of a fantasy that are combined when you play a rally game.

Can playing games give you some skills that you can actually use in real life? Yes. Definitely. Sometimes these matters are technical details of the computer and what it does when you play one of your favorite games. I am many times thinking about technical and programming related matters when I am playing a game. I might think about how this particular game works, how it collects your input and keeps, sort of, count of the total progression of the player.

Sometimes, like when I play a basketball game, I start to think some matters that are related to real life basketball. There are lots of facts that you can connect to a video game. A game is always some sort of a representation of what it is trying to model. These models come from real life. Of course games can represent an idea of a game, also. There are types of games that you like to play and there are these genres that tell us about what kind of a game it is.

Playing games is an activity for mind but also for the body. This is why we have eSport events and it is completely understandable, today, that you can compete in playing games. Some games, like chess, are purely for mind and some games even test our nerves and reaction times. That is why some games you can compete in as a professional only if you are a young person.

There might be a way to think through your physical performance in some activity with playing a game about it first. If you think about basketball or driving you have to be able to explain to others what you are doing and how. For example, if you are a coach, you have this vision that no one in the team doesn’t have. You know how players in your team are feeling, what are their skills and you have also an approximation of how they will perform in the game that you are about to participate in soon.

It might be easier to make a game out of some sport than it would be to create a sport out of a game that doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Are we actually always modelling real life when we create a game? We definitely talk about games a lot. There is lots of going on in a game and in a real life. These all things kind of keep mixing up in our minds. Definitely games brings us a way to express things. Sometimes we mix reality with fantasy.

I am really into Java programming. This programming language has a lot to do with models that are made out of real life objects. It is called object oriented programming. If you are interested in this type of thinking I encourage you to seek more information. I don’t have a degree or a deep knowledge in psychology or philosophy. I still wanted to write about this matter. Maybe you got something out of this blog post. I will write a post again, soon.

Easy to Get Into, Hard to Master

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Viljami

My original idea was to start playing just something on GameCube. I had already played Need for Speed Underground for a while. However my GameCube started to malfunction. So I turned to my Xbox 360. It is always a reliable option that you can actually run NFS UG 2 on. So I started playing a new game again without finishing something I had started. That made me wonder about what I am going to write about here today in this blog post.

Gaming systems can be expensive. Actually manufacturers sell their consoles at a lower price than they even spend producing them. This amount of money is gathered back through games that are sold. Gaming consoles enable gaming. Games bring game companies their money which then brings salaries to game designers and all the other people that are involved in the process.

People are buying games because they are attracted to them. They might find a remake or a sequel satisfying because they have played the original game. There is lots of consumers considering gaming to be a great hobby. Back in the 90s video games were thought to be for children. Now those persons that were playing video games as a child are grown ups. This is how the world changes. Today gaming is the biggest business in the world! Even movie and music industry aren’t as popular.

There is this kind of a formula that keeps coming up. You buy a game because you are interested in it. You have maybe read a review or two. You have seen the trailer and maybe a bit of game play. You buy the game, finally. You have start somewhere. This is when the game is easy. You spend lots of time trying to figure out how to control the character or interact in some other way. You are trying to figure how to play the game.

Then you start to really get into the game. You start figuring out how to succeed and process in the game. There are harder parts. There are easier parts. You might have to check something from YouTube or some other source. You might have to read a chapter of walk through. If possible you try to figure out and solve the problem you are facing in the game by yourself.

After all you have played the game for several hours. Maybe three hours, maybe ten hours or maybe several tens of hours. Some games, like for me, NBA 2K22, you have to spend hundreds of hours. Today I have played over 100 hours of this notorious basketball game. And I feel that I haven’t yet mastered it. I haven’t completed it like 100 percentage. It takes a lot of time to master a game.

So this is the way games draw you into them. But what do you do when you get stuck or the game becomes only a source of frustration? Do you abandon the game you have only some weeks or days ago bought? Well, that is sometimes the case. You change the game that you are playing. Because you feel it hasn’t got anything to give to you anymore. Today there are more and more games that are like this.

Expectations for a game have risen. Maybe you could be satisfied even more if you would spend more time on more better game? How could you find out what game you end up palying for hundred hours instead of buying many games, like tens of games, that you only play for two hours? That’s a tough question. And the stakes are, as you can imagine, very high. I have in recent years bought only some, maybe five or even less, new games in a year.

What is a possible solution and also my humble tip for you gamers? Here it is. Buy new games just some weeks after releasing. Then you can find out if they are full of bugs. Also their price will come down quickly even if they are popular games. You can also buy good but old games. You dive deep into retro gaming and find games you never thought even existed. nd always compare the price of a new game.

Collecting, Buying but not Playing

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Viljami

I am happy that I am currently employed. I work and I also have some freetime. Although I don’t have the amount of time I had as a teenager. I propably wouldn’t even want it to be that way anymore. I guess I have less time for playing today.

As I have less time for gaming I do have more income. That gets me to buy more collectable items, games, that I couldn’t afford some time ago. I am finding myself buying interesting, nostalgic and exciting games. Some of them, the retro ones, I have owned or played during my childhood. Some games just are plain intersting. I think I cannot fully explain this.

There seems be a lot of items for me to get to my hands. I might buy an interesting game and just leave it for a month or two and then get into playing it. I can picture myself buying even things like CRT television, light gun or another retro game console. Those are very interesting things inside my mind.

There are of course limitations. I don’t have so much room in my house. So, what’s next? Moving to a bigger house to collect more games, systems, televisions and what more? There gots to be a limit somewhere.

Instead of just spending all my time playing every retro title I have for two to three hours a day I am actually also finding myself in improving my personal skills. This is somewhat the fact even when I am playing something but I also am spending my free time for learning something new in programming, technology, making my own games and writing texts and making music. So there are lots of things going on and this is just one way that reflects me as an individual.

Everything depends on everything. As I keep spending more time alone or with my wife I find myself quite content in my current situation. I am a developing individual but of course I am not a software developer…at least not at this moment. But who knows what future just might bring!