#have fun sitting in my personalized virtual prison cell <2< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[thermodynamic-comedian]

do people that say "if you block me, that means i'm right" ever realize that the only purpose their glorified school yard taunt serves is making them feel validated and victorious no matter how their opposition responds. and do they then feel that true euphoria when i do block them, i wonder.

[sydneyhongdevblog-blog]

How People Play game

There are many ways of people enjoy playing game, following are my own opinions on how people play game. Do note that all these are just my personal opinions based on my understanding and research done on June 2017. If you are interested to know more, you can click on the link that provided below. 

Premise 1: People enjoy having power

Do you believe if I say having power able to bring happiness? Well, a group of researchers from Tel Aviv University in Israel have done some research and survey on over 350 local adults. The result of the survey have proven power will able bring happiness to people. They published an article about it in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Sources: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797612450891 

The researcher suggested that “power” people have was able to let them do what they want in life.  The results indicated that people who feel powerful in any context tend to be more content, this also creates a feeling of authenticity in life. 

By leading people to be true to their desires and inclinations -- to be authentic -- power leads individuals to experience greater happiness, -  Yona Kifer and colleagues 

In the survey, the powerful people felt 16% more satisfied in their life comparing to least powerful people. This tends to happened more often in workplace, as the powerful colleagues are 26% more satisfied with their job than least powerful colleagues. 

However, when comes to friendship and romantic relationship, the power-based discrepancy in happiness was smaller. The researchers believe this is a sense of community rather than hierarchy, so having power in these situation are less important. 

Sources: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/201304/power-makes-people-happy https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130128143016.htm http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/3820-powerful-people-happiness.html http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167216634064?rss=1 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/people-want-power-because-they-want-autonomy/474669/

Besides that, power is one of the element of fun written by Pierre-Alexandre Garneau published on Gamasutra back in 2001. In the article, he mentions power involves the “capacity of having a strong effect, of acting with strength."

Lets take Diablo II as an example, the mai goal is to make player as stong as they can. Everything player do in this game is make them get to this goal as close as they can, from leveling up from beating up monsters to items drop. 

The goal for most strategy game are also surround the element of power as the player need to build base to create more powerful army than the opponent in order to win the game. 

Power is also a great motivation for the player to move on in many way. 

Game: Final Fantasy 7 (skip to 1:24 for example)

In many of the Role-Playing Games, having sound effect playing when leveling up able to let player feels they have truly become more powerful ad felt good about it. 

Game: Fallout 4

Another great example from First-person Shooters and other games involving a single multi-characters is giving player able to customize character and doing improvement. In order to make player more powerful as the game progresses, giving some statistics and ability to improve them would make a game more interesting.

Sources: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/227531/fourteen_forms_of_fun.php?page=4 http://gel.msu.edu/winn/Serious%20Game%20Construction%20Worksheet.pdf

Premise 2: Torturing is a form of power

First of all, what is torture? According to one of BBC article, torture has been used as a punishment, to intimidate or control people, to get information or just to gratify sadistic impulses. 

Governments have used torture to keep themselves in power, to enforce their particular political philosophy, to remove opposition and to implement particular policies. -BBC

Breaking wheel, also known as the Catherine wheel or simply the wheel, was a torture device used in 18th century.  Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaking_wheel

The first use of torture was happened way back in 530 A.D. when Roman jurists used torture methods to force prisoners to speak the truth. Skilled torturers would use methods, devices, and instruments to prolong life as long as possible while inflicting agonizing pain. During 12th century, Medieval torture reached its peak and by 14th century, torture has become much more sophisticated with the advancement of medieval torture devices.

From 14th century until the end of the 18th century torture was a very common activity and most of the Medieval European country used it part of their countries legal proceedings. Skilled torturers would use methods, devices, and instruments to prolong life as long as possible while inflicting agonizing pain. 

Sources: https://www.elitereaders.com/history-list-of-torture-techniques/ http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-10-most-gruesome-torture-techniques-from-medieval-e-1626942115 http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/torture/introduction.shtml http://www.apt.ch/en/what-is-torture/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture https://worldwithouttorture.org/2012/10/11/ten-facts-to-know-about-torture/

Surprisingly, the Roman Catholic Church were heavily involved in medieval torture to extract a confession, not information. Because the Church are like sitting upon the high hill of morality, they did not want to burn anyone until they had a confession from the persons own lips. From there, they justifying the sinner being burnt to death or hanged. So they used torture.

In Germany, torture devices are actively used during witch trial from the period of 16th to 18th centuries. 

Those accused of witchcraft were portrayed as being worshipers of the Devil, who engaged in such acts as malevolent sorcery at meetings known as Witches' Sabbaths. 

Once the ‘witches’ had given in and confessed under torture, they were taken from the cells and put… well, I guess, right about where you’re standing… where more than 600 of them were burned alive! - Mike Stuchbery

From 1626 to 1631, the Würzburg witch trial are one of the largest mass-trials and mass-executions seen in Europe alongside with Trier witch trials, the Fulda witch trials, and the Bamberg witch trials. With 157 men, women and children in the city of Würzburg, Germany, were burned alive at the stake, with 219 executed in total in the city, and over 900 burnt altogether over the entire area.

The persecutions were orchestrated by Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, Prince Bishop of Würzburg, and his nephew Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, in the years after the Catholic re-conquest of Germany in the 1620s. 

Sources: https://www.quora.com/Who-were-the-people-who-invented-torture-devices http://www.medievalchronicles.com/medieval-torture-devices/ https://www.thelocal.de/20140523/history-of-witch-hunts-in-germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C3%BCrzburg_witch_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period

Conclusion: In game, torturing is a way player feel powerful

In this world, there are many type of Sims player, and most of us spend hours on finding new and creative ways to kill our Sims. 

If you never heard of Sims, this game are actually a life simulator that can control sims characters’ fate. The game first launched back in 2000 and it gave us the absolute power to do what we want with the sims. 

When people are immersed in virtual environments, a phenomenon called the disinhibition effect may be evoked, -Berni Good

Another reason on why people are able to accept torture acts in game was because the art style is cartoonist where nobody take it seriously and no one was harm during these process. Most of the way to kill the sims are more of accident and natural way, like locking them in a room without window, door and food, etc. 

Sources: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/games/2017/01/i-want-cheat-him-and-set-him-fire-why-are-we-sadistic-towards-our-sims https://www.vice.com/sv/article/kwk9zv/why-did-we-all-want-to-kill-our-sims

Some of the player even make a torture chamber, make sims live like a slave and keep working till they die. There are also many players share their experiences and even make blog post about their proud work.

Sources:  http://imgur.com/gallery/l5ppq

If the above is true then the following could be helpful when developing video games (torturing game) in the future as an artist:

Varieties of death animation for characters

Varieties of pre-rendered for environment and props

*Do take notes that these are just my personal opinions. *