{"id":29974,"date":"2015-02-02T02:00:19","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T07:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29974"},"modified":"2017-04-15T13:42:11","modified_gmt":"2017-04-15T17:42:11","slug":"the-point-of-diminishing-interest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/02\/the-point-of-diminishing-interest\/","title":{"rendered":"The point of diminishing interest"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Lileks<\/a> on when gaming stops being fun … because of the damned controller:<\/p>\n

My wife asked if we had an xbox 360, and I said we did. She said that someone on the neighborhood mailing list wanted one and could we sell it. I balked. I haven\u2019t played it for some time but there were two games I wanted to get back to, some day. Why had I stopped? Because I can\u2019t play console games. I can\u2019t aim. I can\u2019t figure out the buttons. Once upon a time I was an ace at Halo<\/em>, but that was long ago, and now there\u2019s just TOO MANY BUTTONS. I\u2019m a keyboard-mouse man and so it has ever been.<\/p>\n

I will never finish those games. The reason they were unfinished was because my characters had walked into walls and fallen off horses and the controller felt like a ceramic croissant in my hand. One of them started out interesting, but turned into a driving game as I chased a suspect. My inability to drive had no bearing on the story; even though I rammed the car into phone poles and fire hydrants and mowed down pedestrians by the dozen, all I got was a \u201cbe careful!\u201d from my partner.<\/p>\n

Every standard image of console gamers shows them sitting back on a sofa, right? Plinking away, trash-talking, relaxed. Every good game I\u2019ve played on a computer has had me on the edge of my seat. Literally. Tense. It\u2019s the difference between playing and inhabiting, between popping in a game disk like you\u2019d put in a movie or turn on the radio, and entering a world. It\u2019s odd, really: the computer screen feels interactive, responsive, an immediate field of action, perhaps because it\u2019s a couple of feet from my face. When I\u2019m sitting in front of a TV, it feels peculiar to interact with it, because it\u2019s supposed to be doing all the work. ENTERTAIN ME! If you do nothing during a game your character stands there, and that makes the TV screen like the real world. It\u2019s like walking away from the TV for a few hours and coming back to see the news anchor is sitting at the desk eating a sandwich.<\/p>\n

So out it goes. It\u2019s a relief, really. When entertainment feels like obligation it\u2019s best to look elsewhere. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I wonder if James was playing L.A. Noire<\/em>, as that was pretty much the point at which I stopped trying to play the game … and my partner said something remarkably like “Be careful!” before I put down the controller and turned off the console.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Lileks on when gaming stops being fun … because of the damned controller: My wife asked if we had an xbox 360, and I said we did. She said that someone on the neighborhood mailing list wanted one and could we sell it. I balked. I haven\u2019t played it for some time but there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,57],"tags":[94],"class_list":["post-29974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming","category-humour","tag-microsoft"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ns","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29974"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29974\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29975,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29974\/revisions\/29975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}