| ▲ | lurk2 8 hours ago | |
I touched on this in my own reply to the grandparent comment [0]. I realized a while ago that lots of competitive games I played regularly were making me feel animosity towards the people I was playing them with, and it led me to think about this issue for quite a while. Competition is such a default in game design that a game not based on it often isn’t recognized as a game at all. There are cooperative games, but aside from Minecraft, none of them are particularly popular. It’s arguable that this a reflection of the human condition; living things are always fighting for resources, so games attempt to emulate this competition. It’s odd that this ended up being the paradigm, though; digital worlds can provide us with a space to explore what we would conventionally consider to be impossible - infinite worlds which obviate the need for competition in the first place. There’s maybe a commentary on human nature to be made that even in a game like Minecraft, so many players’ first inclination is to start fighting each other. | ||