play vs work

now THIS is a subject that interests me. The idea of being able to make real world money out of a video game? Quit my job and take up playing a game all the time? Sign me up for that. I love video games. They're a form of escapism that, if the story is told properly, you can really become immersed in.

My favourite games are all survival horror games. Well, aside from Fallout 3, which is like a great massive multiplayer game, only it's not, and you're the only one playing it.

One thing that the lecturer said this week was that "All games have rules, but not all have goals" and this struck me as very very true. Many, many games I have played over the years served little to no purpose, other than to hack at things until they exploded in a bloody mess. A game with a purpose, I think, is a game that makes you think. A game that makes you sit there and gasp at the screen because something just struck you that you hadn't thought about before. A lot of media can do that, I guess. I know there have been television shows that have done that to me. They can be used as an educating tool, hilighting ignorance or bias and showing people ways to get over it, even if it is just through residual guilt.

The idea of Alternate Reality Games though, that's an interesting one. Escapism is a way of ...well, escaping the world as we know it. I can see how some people might be drawn into these games, like Second Life, or World of Warcraft. And the way that people make money off the games fascinates me. I'm not very good at finance and things like that. Commercially challenged.how they do it completely escapes me, and not everyone can. But it also, tying into the previous entry, raises issues of copyright. If you create content in game, is it really yours? I know people who have created content for games, so does that mean they're breaking the law?

But role playing, or real life games, are the most fun. Seeing what the world would be like if something happened, or if we were all different somehow, is interesting. And all sorts of fun.