4: For Creative Thinking: Games can be a fantastic way of finding new inspiration for creative work. How? There are two ways. The first is easily understood. New ideas come to you when you relax and when you take your mind off of your work, so simply take one hour to play either a heavily story-centred game (with a story you want to get into, one which will spark your imagination and make you forget all about your work) or play a very relaxing game. Either of these ways will help your working mind to relax, which is essential to the construction of new ideas.
The second way to use games to find new ideas is by playing games that force you to think creatively. There are a few really good games for this, most of which you’ll find in either the puzzle genre or RPGs with lots of puzzles (as puzzles often require creative thinking to solve) or in the best platform games like Mario Galaxy 2, which often make very creative use of space. These three genres all inspire gamers to use their creative brains, an inspiration which will bleed into other areas of life, including work, to help inspire creativity there too.

3: For Positive Psychology and Personality Development: Just yesterday, we reported that scientists had proven how reading books makes people develop their personality to be more like their favourite character. The same is true for movies, with movies making viewers become more like the characters they most associate with. And the same is true for any game which you feel very closely related to the lead character.

That doesn’t mean that playing Sonic will make you a hedgehog. But in a story driven game, like one of the Final Fantasy games, for instance, you will naturally being to develop certain traits of your favourite character just by playing the game for a long time. In other words, if you love Aeris, and you play and read and watch Final Fantasy stories, then you will likely develop your spirituality (which is a good thing, given that the health benefits of spirituality are immense).

So, choose a game with a character you feel very close to and one that inspires you in a positive way, and spend time playing that game and actually getting into the character and the story, rather than simply blasting away mindlessly.

2: To develop impulsiveness: This one comes with a great big grain of salt, because being impulsive is not always a good thing. The fact of the matter is that some people are overly impulsive already and actually need to learn to think before acting. However, if you’re not of that character type and instead like to spend time dwelling in your own brain, thinking things out meticulously and never actually acting or doing things, then you may very well wish to consider playing some games that force you to live in the moment, to act on impulse. The best games for that are either those which require very fast reaction times (shooters are good here) or games that scare you and which make you jumpy (you know, the kind when you’re on the edge of your seat and you blast off twenty rounds of hellfire as soon as anything moves—which, of course, is again acting on impulse).

Ask yourself: do you think too much or not enough? If you think too much then play action games that make you work on impulse. If you don’t think enough, play more strategic games where you get torn apart for making rash decisions (fighting games can again be good here, as can RTSs).

1: To Develop Mindfulness: We’ve covered mindfulness quite a lot here on A Role Model, but it certainly is a subject that is worth covering time and again. Mindfulness is essentially the quality of being aware and without judgement of your surroundings. The health benefits of mindfulness are so numerous that they’d make a list longer than the original World of Warcraft manual, but to name a few, mindfulness helps boost your immune system, promote calmness and well being and even improves your social life. And mindfulness can be inspired through games. How? Three letters: RPGs. Play an extremely relaxing RPG game that involves a lot of discovery (like the ones with slightly-different textured areas of walls that indicate hidden pathways) and you’ll find yourself focussing absolutely on the meticulous details of the game world, which is essentially mindfulness in a nutshell. “And that can strengthen your immune system?!” you say? Yes, yes it can. . . provided you play the games through calmly instead of just getting annoyed and smashing the controller when you get stuck. Still, if all else fails you can just roll with Deepak Chopra and Journey.

Thanks for reading. Happy gaming!

The post Five Ways You Can Use Video Games to Make Yourself Godlike appeared first on GamePlayersReview.

Psychology / Psychological Benefits of RPGs in a nutshell:

-They develop mindfulness (a key psychological skill that is used in wide ranging fields from self help for depression to sports psychology)

-They develop creative thinking skills via puzzles (creative thinking is important to many jobs, from a career in teaching to Information Technology)

-They train our minds to work progressively towards a goal

– They are arguably the most relaxing form of game

– They teach our minds to spot how things will logically progress (important to both personal and professional life)

Psychological Benefits of RPGs

RPGs arguably offer more benefits than all other genres. They develop the player’s ability to spot how things will logically progress (both by their storytelling, which is usually significantly deeper than other games, and by character levelling, which develops our ability to see how baby steps lead us to become great characters). They develop pattern recognition and creative thinking abilities–both of which are core components of puzzles–and they even develop our patience as we are often stuck around levelling up for hours on end as opposed to simply progressing through the game–psychologically this serves to teach our minds to slow down, to recognise the importance of small steps and to not expect everything in life to just fall into our laps (a key shortcoming of other genres). More important than all of these benefits, however, is their ability to develop mindfulness and listening and observational skills.

Mindfulness, which can be defined as being openly aware of your environment, is one of the most universally recognised virtues through all societies in the world. In religion it can be found principally in Buddhism, where meditation is used daily to quiet and still a person’s mind and thoughts such that they are less critical and more openly aware of their environment. In self help it is a key part of treatment for depression (because it teaches a person dealing with depression–or anxiety or other psychological issues–to remove negative thoughts). It is used by sports psychologists to help professional athletes increase their focus (among many other things) and finally, it is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world to promote relaxation and happiness.

Mindfulness is great psychologically, but where do RPGs come in?

Glad you asked. Mindfulness is developed through RPGs in two key ways. Firstly, they require the gamer to be mindful (openly aware) of their environment by their inclusion of hidden items and areas. More often that not, hidden areas are marked out only by the subtlest changes in the environment (the music might change slightly, a wall or patch of grass might be a slightly different colour, your character might react in some almost imperceivable way when you approach a hidden item and so on. Because the player wants to locate every hidden item and area, they will continually remind themselves to be very aware of the game world in case one of these change of colour, sound or character animation occurs. Over hours and hours of gameplay, the player then learns to naturally be more mindful in real life and this has myriad benefits, as discussed above.

The second way in which RPGs teach players to be mindful is via the nature of their storytelling.

A truly great RPG game will be told through the words of many non-player characters as they all reveal little but important parts of the plot, parts that, when put together, serve to instruct the gamer of how to progress through the game.

The ability to do well in a good and challenging RPG will require the gamer to pay great attention to all the words of characters they meet and then to put those words together so they can read the whole story. And how important a skill is that to life?

In life, every one of us is only able to perceive but a small part of the big picture. It is imperative to our success in real life that we find both the patience and the willingness to listen to those we meet, even though oftentimes we might not agree with them. It is only by listening with an open mind that we can ever hope to achieve enough knowledge to go on to do great things in the real world. Thankfully, in RPGs we gamers have an immediately accessible and highly enjoyable tool with which to develop our listening and mindfulness skills.

The Other Psychological Benefits

Creative Thinking: Puzzles in RPGs more often that not require the gamer to visualise how certain shapes or objects will interact with one another. Take the puzzle from Skyward Sword where Link has to extend the bridge on the Isle of Songs. This puzzle essentially requires one thing of the gamer: an ability to see how different objects can be brought together via a set of movements to create something new. It is a typical creative thinking activity.

Valuing the Small Steps: In titles where character levelling is particularly important the player is encouraged to develop their understanding of how baby steps lead us up the mountain. Psychologically speaking this is an essentially skill throughout life, from crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s in order to appear professional to valuing the importance of every single healthy meal in a weight loss program in order to get thin.

Relaxation: The relaxation of RPGs is self explanatory, with them taking place often in large open areas (offering exploration which encourages our minds to wander and leads us to relax) being significantly slower than most other genres and with artistic direction that is intentionally designed to chill the gamer out (lots of green grass, slow and melodic soundtracks etc).

These are the key psychological benefits of RPGs and they are rich and plentiful. Should anyone ever ask you why you spend so many hours playing RPGs, simply look up at them curiously and say, ‘Why, I’m developing my mindfulness. If you’d like to know more might I recommend the work of Thich Nhat Hanh or perhaps Deepak Chopra? Or failing that, here [hand over controller], just explore Skyrim for a few hours. You’ll find it most enlightening.”

The post Our Study Shows that Playing RPG’s Expands Your Mind appeared first on GamePlayersReview.

In order to best explain this we’ll consider Daigo’s classic match VS Sabin at Seasons Beatings.

Any part of the Daigo VS Sabin match will illustrate how effective fighting games are at getting us to make split-second decisions, but or particular interest is when Daigo Umehara (Ryu) performs an absolutely sick C.FP to Super to counter Arturo Sanchez’s (Dhalsim) F.FP and win the match. That’s what happens in-game, but what i happen in-brain? (see what I did there.. . )

First things first, he has a set of options in his mind (he has various moves he can choose between) and he has to choose the best move to use. He chooses to cancel crouching fierce into super based on several observations: he has full super, it’s his only real chance to regain the health advantage and, most importantly, he knows there is a high possibility that Sabin will use Dhalsim’s F.FP because it’s a fairly safe move (or at least should be–check out the look on Sabin’s face after to see just how amazed he was). As can be seen, Daigo has to choose the best move from many possibilities and he has to do so whilst under pressure. The first benefit of fighting games, as is here seen, is the ability to make quality decisions in minimal time whilst under pressure. This is the exact same skill that is used in thousands of occupations, from stock and options trading to police enforcement (of course the amount of pressure and the amount of knowledge required varies but the underlying, core mental process that occurs in these activities remains the same: we make judgement calls under pressure).

Next up, Daigo has to bait Sabin to press a button when at the right spacing (if the two characters were closer together or further away this set-up would not work). To do so, he has to analyse a huge amount of information by working out Sabin’s movement habits. This information includes: analysing the way Sabin reacts to Daigo’s own movements; analysing the pattern of Sabin’s moves; determining exactly when and where Sabin likes to attack in order to be prepared to counter.

Finally, whilst all this information is being processed, Daigo has to react in literally spilt seconds to hit the button in time.

So, we have the ability to hold lots of information whilst simultaneously carrying out extensive data analysis and finally putting it all together in one moment of blisteringly quick reactions. All in all, we have one heck of a great tool for developing decision making skills, skills that can very readily be applied to a great variety of jobs and other real life situations. It is not hard to see how these positive effects of fighting games could be adapted for use in corporate training education, personal development programs or even athletics training.

Other Positive Benefits of Fighting Games

They teach us how to be patient: Decent fighting game skills require the gamer to patiently bait out mistakes from the opponent that they can then punish. Patience is one of the most obvious differences between an absolute noob and a fairly decent player as noobs will almost always opt to simply rush in and will end up being countered all day until they are dead (A.K.A Jump, Uppercut, Jump, Uppercut, Jump… yawn). The patience fighting games develop is applicable to myriad areas of personal and professional life but is perhaps most applicable to public sector work like public health service jobs and police law enforcement jobs.

Positive Thinking Exercise: Whilst a good gamer will be patient, they won’t just sit around waiting for the opponent to come to them. Instead, they must continually pressure the opponent in order to force them to make a mistake. Essentially, this means the gamer is continually working towards a positive goal and hence is developing their positive thinking skills. Again, there are a great many areas where this skill is applicable, including: personal life (from success in weight loss programs to confidence with women), education (I’m sure I’m not alone when I state that positive thinking was absolutely essentially to getting through my university degree and was perhaps even more so in drama school, which this author attended during his obsession with education).

Pattern Recognition: A lot of fighting game skills come down to what is referred to by the fighting game community as “Yomi.” Yomi is commonly considered mind reading, but in reality is the ability to interpret move sequences in order to know what comes next. In other words, fighting games develop your pattern recognition abilities, skills that are applicable to jobs such as being a software engineer or solution architect.

Planning & Adapting: Being good at fighting games requires the player to form complex strategies to use in different match-ups, but more importantly requires them to have the wit to change that strategy at the press of a button (literally).

Relaxation: Whilst the actual fighting in fighting games is very exciting and serves to get the blood boiling, fighting games can very quickly be turned into a tool for relaxation by heading to the training room. Any fighting game player will instantly know what this is about, but for those readers who do not play fighting games themselves, the training room can best be thought of as a sandbox where players can try out new moves, tricks and combos on a dummy-opponent. Here, two key relaxation tools can be found. Firstly, there is the relaxation found in exploration as the player sets about trying out new moves and set-ups. Perhaps better than this however, is the ability to perform combos over and over again. Learning combos in fighting games is rather like learning basic piano tunes, and, as with piano playing, the rhythm and repetition of combos naturally serves to calm the mind.

Overall: Next time someone tells you you’re wasting time playing fighting games, tell them you’re simultaneously developing your decision making skills, patience, positive thinking habits and pattern recognition skills cause you don’t know whether to work in stock trading, law enforcement or solutions architecture. That should shut them up.

The post The Positive Effect Of Fighting Games On Your Life appeared first on GamePlayersReview.

How is it that games are able to entertain millions of people around the world for hours every day? How is it that a game can motivate players to play through hours of content, completing numerous missions, dying, restarting, failing, but ultimately reaching the end of the game while offering no real, tangible incentive for doing so? Why is it that when we play a game we feel numerous heightened emotions, from excitement to empowerment, even though games, at face value, aren’t even real? If you’re a gamer you know that a game can make you feel larger than life.

Games don’t achieve this through some bizarre pixel-magic. At their centre, games are psychological powerhouses. Developers know what it is that makes gamers tick, and they turn the desires, imaginations and emotions of gamers into a product of entertainment. Entertainment, however, is just one small part of gaming. The true power of gaming comes from understanding how games motivate and empower gamers.

Once you understand how games motivate you and make you feel empowered, you can apply the same laws to real life. In this article we will be revealing the many wonderful ways in which games work psychologically, and then applying those gameplay mechanics to real life. We’ll cover all major gaming genres, from shooting games to RPGs, looking at the psychological rules governing their gameplay, and then applying those rules to real life. What this means is that if you’re a gamer who loves RPGs, you’ll discover why you love RPGs, how RPGs motivate you to keep playing and how you can turn the laws of RPG design into laws for real life. Or, if you’re a fan of shooters, you’ll discover how shooters make gamers feel empowered, and likewise apply those laws to real life. Games have the power to motivate, to empower, to create joy and happiness and many more positive.

By learning to apply those laws to real life you’ll discover the secret to motivating yourself to complete your real life objectives and find success outside of gaming.

Fact: Games are not about gaming

 

Games aren’t about gaming, or about characters, or about weapons or any other immediately observable aspect of a game. Games are about people. More specifically, games are about you. If you play a game you love and find yourself motivated to play through tens of hours of gameplay to reach the end, clearly that game is creating a sense of motivation in you, the gamer.

In this sense, though every observable aspect of the game, from its characters to its story and its weapons, is entirely fictitious, there is one very real aspect of the game: the way it motivates your brain. Your human reaction to what is happening on screen is the reality of gaming. Similarly, if you play shooting games and feel a tremendous sense of power from wielding a fictional gun, though the gun itself might not be real, your emotional and psychological reaction to it is. The sense of empowerment you get from playing is real.

Whether it’s the sense of creativity we experience from playing a game like Scribblenauts or Little Big Planet, the sense of emotional attachment we develop to the characters in a game, or the feeling of freedom we experience when looking out over a vast and gorgeous backdrop, such as those in Assassin’s Creed 3, Bioshock Infinite, Uncharted or similar games, the psychological reaction to gaming is always real. And because our psychological reaction to gaming is real, we can use it in real life. Imagine being able to take the sense of motivation we feel when playing a large RPG like Skyrim and applying it to our real life jobs. Imagine being as confident in real life as you are when you play games you’re good at. Imagine living with the sense of freedom you feel when playing an adventure game, only in real life. This is all possible once we understand the laws governing game design, and once we apply those laws to real life.

The Laws of Motivation in Game Design Applied to Real Life

Many of us lack motivation in real life. There’s nothing strange about that. Motivation in real life, it seems, can be difficult to achieve. Whether our real life ambition is to lose weight, to earn top grades in our exams, to get a promotion at work or any other worthwhile goal, finding motivation can be challenging. There most likely isn’t a single person alive who doesn’t know what it feels like to be unmotivated. We might get out of bed late, struggle to get ourselves to the gym, lack energy in the workplace, or simply not give a damn about our sense of progress in real life. But then we turn on a game and we immediately experience a heightened sense of motivation. We want to be the name at the top of the online leaderboards, we want to reach the end of the game and unlock all the achievements, we want to have characters with maxed-out stats. Motivation is never lacking in a quality game. But just how does a good game motivate us to complete every objective it sets before us, and how can we apply those laws of motivation to real life?

The First Law of Motivation: Setting the Scene

The first thing a game must do in order to motivate gamers is to give them a purpose. We want to know why we are playing. There are many ways in which games establish this sense of purpose. Story driven games will usually begin with a cutscene that tells us what the game is all about and what we are going to achieve in it. One of the best openings in any video game is in God of War 3. As the game opens we see the towering Mount Olympus, home of the Olympian Gods, the number one power in the world, wielding an all powerful army of sentries, guardians, sentinels and more. We meet Kratos, the Spartan demigod, and in meeting him we are informed of our mission: vengeance against Zeus for his betrayal.

In reality, this epic opening scenes serves a few key purposes: 1) it introduces us to our character and in-game self(Kratos), 2) it inform sus of our mission and 3) the reason for the mission (as an act of revenge).

Nearly every opening scene in history serves these three points of telling us

1) who we are (sense of identity),

2) our purpose

and 3) the importance and reason for our purpose.

These three key points are more than just the basics of a good game intro. They serve to create a believable sense of identity. In real life, just as in gaming, our sense of who we are most usually revolves around the answers to these three questions:

Who are you?

What is your ambition?

Why is your ambition important to you? Just as a game intro gives us a fictional sense of self with these three questions and in so doing launches us down a path towards an objective, so too do we define ourselves with these three questions, and send ourselves into the future based on their answers.

Self motivation through character definement

The first and most important rule of self motivation, then, is to provide clear answers to these three questions. To provide an example, allow me to answer these three questions for myself, as I sit here writing this article.

1) Who are you: A games journalist

2) What is your purpose: To take the positive psychology rules of game design and apply them to real life

3) Why is your mission important? : Because revealing the real life applications of game design empowers gamers in real life.

By simply answering these three questions we create a sense of purpose that will motivate us towards our end goal.

Expanding on our motivations

Naturally, motivation in game design isn’t just about the opening scene. Once a game developer has created our sense of in-game self and given us purpose, it is imperative that we be constantly reminded of these elements as the game progresses. The most traditional way for game developers to remind us of our identity and purpose is by breaking a game up into levels, each with their own missions and bookmarked by cutscenes.

Typically, a game will follow a logical sense of progression which will look something like the following:

1) Opening cutscene for a level: each level starts with a cutscene or piece of dialogue that tells us what is going on, what our mission is and how we are to achieve it.

2) Action: We will go through the motions of completing the level

3) Boss Fight: We will defeat an enemy or complete some other important task that provides a sense of success, moving us towards the end of the game. For instance, a shooter might have us taking down the members of an evil organisation one by one. With each boss we take down we move closer to the end goal of eliminating the entire evil organisation.

4) End cutscene for the level: This will provide a sense of achievement by showing us what we have accomplished, and perhaps by developing our character. Essentially, the entire game comes down to one large objective, broken up into smaller objectives. For every step of the game we are constantly told what we are doing and why we are doing it, as well as being shown the results of our action so as to reward us for our effort. This might sound a little complex, but it becomes much more easy to understand once we apply it to real life.

How to apply the concepts of level design to real life

Motivation in gaming comes down to always being aware of our goal and having manageable missions to complete towards the attainment of that goal.

Whatever your goal is, apply the concepts of game design by doing the following:

1) Write down your end goal and why it’s important: If, for instance, your end goal is to achieve the top marks in your university degree, then you might write down “Achieve top marks (which is the goal) in order to be qualified for a high paying job (which is the reason).

2) Break the goal down into smaller goals (levels) : having too big a goal will only cause you to feel overwhelmed. For success, it’s imperative to break the goal down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Continuing with the example of a university degree, you may choose to logically break your main goal down into smaller goals by taking each module of the degree as a level.

3) Create your intro “cutscenes” for level 1: In order to motivate yourself, remind yourelf of what your goal is for your current “level” (objective) and why that level / objective is important.

4) Break the level into actions: Now that you have a series of levels, break each of those levels into actions that you can begin to take. For the university degree example, you might choose to break your levels into units of work, laying out the hours you will work each week.

5) Perform the actions: Begin to work through the actions you stated above. If at any point you need further motivation, remind yourself of your mission and reason.

6) End cutscene for the level: It is imperative that at the end of each unit of action you remind yourself what you have achieved. This enforces a sense of accomplishment which will motivate you for the next level. By breaking down your main goal into levels and by continually reminding yourself of the reason for each level, as well as your overall goal, you create a workable plan and support it with continual motivation. This is how a game gets you from start to finish, and it is twice as effective when applied to real life.

Motivational Top-ups

As well as creating motivation through purpose, identity and reason, as discussed above, games constantly motivate gamers through various rewards. Back in the days of Space Invaders, an example of a game reward might be a tiny little block representing a spaceship blowing up into tiny pixels, representing a successful hit. These days, gamers are much more demanding. Developers have to reward gamers in many various ways. Among the most popular rewards in gaming are:

Weapon upgrades: We’re constantly hoping to find the next big gun, or a new part which will upgrade our current gun. Many times, we continue playing specifically to unlock the best weapon so we can watch huge explosions or gory deaths.

Unlockable Items: Going side by side with weapons are other unlockable items, like armour, tools, keys and so on.

Character Upgrades and Stats: Character stats have long been the main motivational factor in RPGs. By telling us how many points we need to achieve to upgrade our character, RPGs keep us playing until we have a completely maxed-out character.

Graphics: Graphical treats abound in all forms of games. Whether it’s a beautiful piece of scenery like those in Bioshock Infinite or Skyrim, or a stunning set-piece, like the explosion of an enemy vehicle or building, or a new and beautiful character, we’re constantly being treated to new graphics.

New Areas: There’s nothing quite like unlocking a new room or a new are of the map to explore. We complete one area in order to unlock the next, and so on, until the entire map has been seen.

Online Score: Online scores become hugely addictive. Games like Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition 2012 have tons of players playing each and every day in order to get their name near the top of the scoreboard.

Whatever type of rewards a game offers, one thing is always clear: we need rewards in order to motivate ourselves to keep going. This is precisely the same in real life. By associating awards to positive actions, we motivate ourselves to keep on the right track. No one just wants to work, and no one wants to wait forever for an eventual success that may or may not come. It’s imperative to reward yourself day in and day out for positive steps that you take. To motivate yourself to keep moving towards your objective, reward yourself for every positive step. What have you done today? What have you achieved? How are you going to reward yourself for it? Reward is imperative to motivation. If you don’t reward yourself for the good you have done today, you will feel less motivated to do good tomorrow. “Games reward you for effort. This keeps you motivated. Just as in a game, reward yourself for every positive action you take. This will motivate you to continue working positively in the future.”

The Importance of Rewarding Effort, Not Result

The final point of note in our section about motivation is this: it is essential to reward yourself not for results, but for effort. Game developers and psychologists both know this to be true. In a game, you don’t want less skilled players to stop playing because they’re not good enough to unlock new items and weapons or to reach the end of a level. Instead, developers offer rewards regardless of the amount of success a player has in the game. This is part of the reason why games have become progressively easier over the years.

Hardcore games of old were great for skilled gamers, but casual and unskilled gamers found zero motivation to play because they weren’t talented enough to complete missions. These days, games are easy. A game like God of War Ascension gifts players with amazing moves and combos that require almost no skill to perform. Other games offer “Easy” settings, and others still reward gamers for time spend playing, regardless of how well they were playing. Again, this isn’t a rule specific to gaming. Positive Psychology coaches (whose work in applying the science of psychology to happiness and positivity) proved that the key to staying motivated is rewarding your effort, not your results. The reason why it’s important to reward effort rather than result is simple to understand. Oftentimes, in life, we do the wrong thing but don’t get the right results.

If, for instance, we try our hardest in an exam but end up with unsatisfactory results, it can tempting to throw your hands up in the air and give up studies if you focus on results alone. By focussing on effort instead, we reward ourselves for having tried hard in the exams, even if we weren’t successful. In this way, we are still motivated to try hard next time around. Whatever your goal is, you need to reward yourself for effort and time spent trying, rather than hard results. You wouldn’t continue playing a game if you kept dying over and over with no sense of reward, and likewise with life. Reward effort and you will stay motivated, just as you do in games.

CONCLUSION By taking the rules of game design and applying those laws to real life, you will be able to achieve and maintain heightened levels of motivation.

The post The Mind Blowing Psychology Of Video Games appeared first on GamePlayersReview.

“On no, my scarf is blowing in the wind” said this Superman cosplay girl, totally ignoring the fact that she was virtually naked  

“I’m angry… and you love it” said this Mortal Kombat Jade cosplayer

“My leaves are falling off” she said…

“Do you come here often” that’s what I said. Didn’t turn out well.  Look at those eyes… girl knows she looks good 

  

You should see what happened when this Cyclops gets together with Jean Grey… sparks fly…

“I have a face you know,” she said

 

… And then she said “Just ’cause I dress like this doesn’t mean you have to stare

The post A bevy of cosplay babes tell us not to look at them like that appeared first on GamePlayersReview.

The retail industry is not known for its ethics. Let’s just be completely honest about this, retail is bullshit. But you’re never really exposed to precisely how bad the retail industry is until you work in it. For many gamers, the idea of working in a video game store seems like a dream job. After all, we all love video games so why not work in the industry?

The simple answer is that working in the retail sector of the video game industry exposes you to the unjustifiable bullshit that is rampant throughout. Corruption, backstabbing… these are all frequent when working in a video game store. While people constantly come in and say “Wow, you work in a games store, that must be so much fun!” The reality is anything but.

Here’s the shocking truth about working in a video game store.

SELL THIS OR WE’LL PUNISH YOU!

When you work in a video game store you are forced to sell X amount of numerous different items. You don’t get commission for this. You don’t get a plus. You just get warned that if you don’t sell enough items your hours will be cut. Cut hours are something most of us can’t afford. Cut hours means not paying the bills, not having enough money to but the groceries, or not being able to have any sort of a social life whatsoever.

Customers start to hate you

Because you’re forced to sell X number of items, you’re constantly pushing your customers to buy stuff. That’s not because you want them to buy more—not commission, after all—it’s just because you want to keep your job. So you try to make the sale you need to keep your job, and hey presto the customer has a go at you for being too “In their face” or too pushy. Literally, you’re between a rock and a hard place. You can’t please both the customer and the manger, it’s impossible.

The manager hates you because the customer hates you because…

Ironically, even if you manage to get the customer to buy enough goods to please your manager, your manager may end up hating you regardless. Why? Because the customer who you were forced to sell extra goods to then goes to the manager and tells them they were given bad service. At this point, instead of thinking “We need to change our policies” they think “We need to blame the employee for absolutely everything.” You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t.

BUY PRE OWNED… NOW!

Gaming stores make more money if the customer purchases pre-owned goods. So guess what? The manager forces you to stuff pre-owned goods in the customers face. Problem is the customer doesn’t actually want pre-owned goods because they’re often not that much cheaper and, well, they’re pre owned. So you force the pre owned crap down the customers face and again the customer thinks you’re a grand a-hole.

Sexual Harassment

Being a girl in a gaming store is even worse than being a guy. Sorry, but it just is. Why? Because sexual harassment, that’s why. As a girl gamer in a game store you’re constantly being hit on by guys. And apparently (according to management) you should be okay with that! In no way should you be offended at the fact that you cannot do your job without being hit on by guys. How this is justifiable I honestly do not know. But the reality is that you need your job to live so you can’t piss off your manager, so if you’re manager tells you to “shut up and deal with it” then that should be a-okay. And what’s the answer to this? No clue.

And at the end of the day, you lose your job and hate games

Before long, you start to lose the very love of games that got you into gaming in the first place. Don’t get me wrong I hate saying that, but when you’re exposed to the corruption and bullshit of the industry, you look at it from a different perspective. I’ve quit my job, because I refuse to let my job ruin my love for games. I’m now looking for another job. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Thanks for reading.

Guest post:

This was a guest post written by our close friend and fellow journalist Tammy Bridgewater. Join us on our Facebook pages for more articles from Tammy.

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Nintendo; maybe you should hire some of these fan artists

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The Hitman: Agent 47 trailer is out and one things painfully obvious: Agent 47 is bored shitless of stealth. For a movie based on a game that’s supposed to be all about stealth, the Hitman: Agent 47 trailer is packed full of a ridiculous amount of explosions and all out gun-toting shenanigans. Someone better get to da choppa.

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This is what happens when bright gamers come together: they change things. 

That’s right, speedrunning video games on camera laid to the raising of over a million dollars for cancer prevention. And as someone who (like many of us) has lost a family member to cancer, I have to say a whopping great “Thanks” to Awesome Games Done Quick.

The stream included masterful players speedrunning games like The Legend of Zelda The Ocarina Of Time, and completing seemingly impossible levels of Tetris. The gameplay was an inspiration in itself, but the money raised for charity is so much more important.

Awesome Games Done Quick; we salute you! 

In the immortal words of Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts: This story is happy end.

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How game design needs to change to allow for compelling storytelling…

Example of a video game storyboard

Watching the prologue to Ori And The Blind Forest earlier today I found myself thinking back over my gaming life. Thirty years ago, the vast majority of games didn’t have anything even closely resembling a story. In the 1980s, games truly were just games. Sim City, Donkey Kong, Defender… While the occasional treat like Maniac Mansion presented a decent narrative, quality story-driven games were scarce.

Art for Ori and the Blind Forest

ori-and-the-blind-forest-concept-art

Storytelling in games has come far, but still has a long way to go
We’ve come a long way. The oft-debated cutscenes of such games like those of the Final Fantasy series helped to bring a deeper sense of plot to games. From the Red Alert intro to every single cutscene that Hideo Kojima forced into Metal Gear Solid IV, cutscenes crammed a story into a game. But that’s precisely what they did: they crammed and forced stories into games.

Cutscenes gaves us narratives told in the pauses of games. They never really merged gameplay and story, they never made those two divisible elements one. The player wasn’t actively involved with the cutscene, there’s no interactivity there, and therefore, there’s no genuine merger of game and story, there’s merely an interruption of gameplay while the story is told, as though story were the commercial to gaming’s central feature. 20th January 2015

CONTINUE READING HERE. 

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