sirwiggum said:I remember Jet Set Willy flushing the character down a toilet and going to another area. Was this an actual move?
Video games depict religion as violent, problematized, study shows
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-vid ... olent.html
February 27th, 2012 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences
In the past few years, the video game industry has grown from a niche
market into a major part of mainstream media. This increase in popularity and use of technology has allowed video game developers to insert more detail and nuance into the storylines of their games. Many video games have begun incorporating religion as a key aspect to plot points and story lines. Greg Perreault, a doctoral student in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found that the many newer-generation video games equate religion with violence in the game narratives.
Perreault examined five recent video games that incorporate religion heavily into the storyline. The video games he studied were "Mass Effect 2," "Final Fantasy 13," "Assassin's Creed," "Castlevania: Lords of Shadow" and "Elder Scrolls: Oblivion". Perreault found that all of these video games problematize religion by closely tying it in with violence.
"In most of these games there was a heavy emphasis on a "Knights Templar" and crusader motifs," Perreault said. "Not only was the violent side of religion emphasized, but in each of these games religion created a of problem that the main character must overcome, whether it is a direct confrontation with religious zealots or being haunted by religious guilt."
While Perreault observed a relationship between violence and video games, he does not believe video game developers are creating an intentional commentary on religion.
"It doesn't appear that game developers are trying to purposefully bash organized religion in these games," Perreault said. "I believe they are only using religion to create stimulating plot points in their story lines. If you look at video games across the board, most of them involve violence in some fashion because violence is conflict and conflict is exciting. Religion appears to get tied in with violence because that makes for a compelling narrative."
Perreault presented his findings at the Center for Media Religion and Culture Conference on Digital Religion.
Provided by University of Missouri-Columbia
BlackRiverFalls said:They missed Bioshock 2 out of that and the wonderfully smug and unpleasant Sophia Lamb, voiced by the actress who played Agatha Christie in Doctor Who.
Killswitch is a game that was supposedly created by Soviet gaming company Karvina Corporation in 1989. Only limited copies of the game were produced (between 5,000 to 10,000 copies) and it was very popular among Soviet gamers. The game itself was a pioneer in the survival horror genre. You had to choose between two characters, a girl or an invisible demon. The goal of the game was to navigate through an abandoned coal mine while battling demons and coal monsters. As it was hard to navigate the game with an invisible character people choose to complete the game with the girl character. Unfortunately, No one ever completed the game with the demon, because upon beating the game all trace of it would be erased from your hard drive.
In 2005, an unopened copy of the self-deleting game surfaced on Ebay where it was promptly bought for $733,000 by a man from Japan named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube. The only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
Fallout 3 is a vast open world role playing game. Therefore, it would not be surprising to find that there are things within the game that many people have yet to discover. However, it is claimed by some that they have found something in the game that may predict the future.
The story goes that the post-apocalyptic game predicts the future, in the real world, using morse code and hidden messages within the games radio station. There are stations that broadcast morse code in the game. However, some claim that you can hear a DJ on the station rambling off such cryptic phrases as "The Queen has died today. The world mourns, as on days like these we are all Brits" and "I can't believe Britney's actually won an Oscar!" These phrases are followed by a series of numbers in morse Code that can be interpreted as dates. Whether or not the Queen will die on March 19, 2014 remains to be seen. Bethdesa, the company that designed the game, denies that these cryptic radio stations exist.
I remember playing a game on my AtariST in the late 80s/early 90s, some freeware or demo, I honestly can't remember. It was a game where you flew a small silver jet-like craft and had to avoid mountains on either side. I'd played the game many times before but on one occasion the controls just stopped working, the plane flew itself and landed on a small patch of land. I watched as this little pixelated man got out and had a wee! Little wee-pixels arcing into the air! The he got back into the craft, took off and my joystick started working again!
I ran and told my dad and replayed and replayed the game in front of him, but it never happened again! Similarly with friends, I could never replicate the incident. I could tell people thought I was making it up, but I know it happened! It was so odd.
Looking back now it was probably some joke the programmer put it, to only occur when certain criteria was filled. Strange though! My own urban legend!
a man from Japan named Yamamoto Ryuichi. Ryichi had planned to document his play through of the game on YouTube. The only video Ryuchi posted was of him staring at his computer screen and crying.
As gamers grow older and more suspicious, the rumors need to get more difficult to debunk. We live in an age where the rumor birth/death cycle happens months before a game is even released. So – the Fallout 3 morse code rumor. Each Fallout game has been filled with obscure references and secret Easter Eggs that are still only now being discovered, so a lot of people were ready to believe strange morse code messages might be real in Fallout 3 – even if they were predicting the future.
If you killed Three-Dog and completed the game through the destruction of Raven Rock, Galaxy News Radio would occasionally turn to a "numbers station" (think Lost) followed by morse code messages.
The creepier interpretations of these involve the exact date of the Queen of England's death, Britney Spears winning an Oscar, and someone rambling about the end of the world. What gave these messages credence were some other supposed decoded messages – predicting Gary Coleman's death and the BP Gulf oil spill. The real advantage of this hoax was that the messages were hard to come by, and even if you could find some, most gamers can't easily interpret morse code transmissions. So instead, our instinct was to trust the internet. Internet rumors…internet rumors never change.
gncxx said:Yeah, swearing in computer adventure games could provide literally seconds of entertainment.
Mary used to walk onscreen and poke you.davidplankton said:Something used to happen in Valhalla for the Spectrum if you swore but I can't remember what it was now.
OneWingedBird said:That's funny, I'd heard the BREAk WINDow story too but about the game mentioned in the post above yours.
This reminds me of the game The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (based on a choose-your-own-adventure book) - putting swear words into the high score chart would prompt responses, and entering "The Hobbit" would give you the reply "The only game more tedious than this..."