hencook

That might be true, but it's oversimplifying it. Why do third person shooters exist? Because you like looking at your character. Because melee attacks make more sense in third person than they do in first person. Because you feel more grounded looking at your character when you can visibly see which shots miss, and how high cover is compared to your character. Because having your back against a low wall makes your profile smaller, but this isn't possible in a first person shooter (imagine an FPS requiring you to have your back turned when you take cover!).

These are all GREAT reasons to play a third person shooter. But it's marred by the all-seeing camera.

@hunter5024 said:

How would you feel if a grenade was tossed at you from a person that was behind cover and you couldn't even see that person? It's not fun.

Restricting the player's ability is not always inherently bad. You can't shoot diagonally in Megaman. You can't shoot a gun forever, you need to reload. If the player's third person camera is restricted to what the character can see, the player will simply have to rely on other information like sound or teamwork.

I want to like third person shooters, but I find the concept largely flawed. Currently, third person shooters are camping oriented because movement incurs risk of being seen by someone you can't see.

Everyone's citing only good examples of racism in video games. Bioshock Infinite acknowledges racism as a problem from that time period. So what? That's GOOD racism.

Here's some "bad" racism that you should include!-
RE5- People took issue with it. Was the game racist? Probably not. Even if the game wasn't racist, the controversy surrounding it was!
GTA Vice City Haitian Controversy.
Token black characters that check the "racial diversity" checkbox.
XBLA Halo Voice Chat- There was a good piece where I remember some guy on XBLA telling people "What if I told you, I'm black?"
Marketing Trends- Video games were created after MLK, so all the video game stories that you're running into are likely to be free of racism or addressing racism in a good way. But that doesn't change the fact that the industry itself is racist. The character you last played is likely to be white. If the character was female, then she'd have some pretty striking features (sexism is more prevalent than racism in video games imo), and actually video game devs have been creative enough to allow you to just play your own race by creating your own character.

Bottom Line: You're not going to find dirt on racism in the stories of video games. If you concentrate on the concept of video games itself, as a media, you'll find the good dirt.

Dante's Inferno. No, not hell. I'd like to go to the beginning of Dante's Inferno, which takes place on Earth. Since Dante went to hell, it's confirmed that heaven exists in DI, so I would become a hardcore christian and then go to heaven, eternally.

BEAT THAT. HEAVEN.

This sounds like a sociopath trying to blend in more...

A sociopath is a person with an antisocial personality disorder
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

A sociopath disregards the feelings of others and their well being. I admit I am asocial, but I am not antisocial because I have no wish to harm society. It really doesn't help anybody to address me as a sociopath.

@hencook: What you do wrong is assuming there's some hotfix or cure to not being able to socialize. There isn't. Trust me, I would know. I used to be really quiet and shy but the only way to break out of that shell is to really work for it. But there's no easy fix, unless you want to read all those creepy pick-up artist books (which you shouldn't do, don't touch them). To me it sounds like you just want to learn how to talk to people, and break out of the walls you built around yourself, which is great. Coming to that realization is healthy and necessary in my opinion.

Where you need to start this change is in your head, not with other people directly. It's not about knowing what to talk about, but rather being confident in what you do say. Showing confidence goes a long way when you talk to people. Don't over-think things, don't assume anything about another person and learn how to bend a conversation to things both of you can talk about. But other than that, you just need to find a hobby you like and get involved in it. Not having anything to build a social circle from is incredibly difficult but it's not impossible. Having lists of topics to talk about that you don't actually know anything about will only make it more difficult.

In existentialist philosophy, every person has to find their own meaning in life. You can only ever live a full life, truly "exist", if you acknowledge who you are, what wants and needs make you uniquely you, what the nature of the world is, and continually make choices that stem from these realisations. Therefore, you can never live a full life if you just pursue a general notion of what is commonly considered "normal". You have to strive to truly understand yourself first and accept the nature of the human condition.

Hope this helps.

Being a normal, balanced individual. A how-to guide:

1. Interact with people you meet in a non-threatening manner, treating the person in front of you like a living human being with thoughts and motives.
2. Do not consider any interaction with any person to be a transaction, apart from those made in shops.
3. Practice personal hygiene and refrain from partaking in or discussing sexually deviant behaviour in public. Or ever.

There you go, now don't make any more lists.

The thread title character limit has limited me to put "How to be a normal person". I'm not talking about the general encompassing "Be Sane, Obey Natural Instincts like Eating and Sleeping, and be a cooperative member of society", I'm talking about general interests and the question of studying them for their valued normality.

All I have to do to be normal is to continue being weird? I jest. But seriously and more personally, not being normal has become a problem. I find myself unable to talk to others at parties when they leave me in the dust, talking about general interests. I'll do fine if I'm leading the conversation, but I generally have a difficult time socializing.

Sure, I could continue to go on a video game website to selectively find people to talk about video games with, but it still doesn't solve the problem that I'm unable to communicate with general people, or how undoubtedly disconnected I am when they change topics from something I'm comfortable with to something I'm not. 

People of the same age group have different interests, but certain interests are more popular than others. The farther down the list a subject is, the less it matters, that much is true, but what about the most popular subjects?

I imagine myself going to a bar, talking to a fellow, and that fellow would ask me how I thought about the Lakers. My response would be that I have not actually seen the full extent of a basketball game, so I do not like or hate it. I simply don't know. He is more likely to ask me about the Lakers than a certain hockey team.

Even being simply aware of the lack of knowledge in these areas is important, I would consider.