Mr Ink 5000 said:
BGH122 said:
Then we fall into the same equally fallacious "Try it, you might like it" nonsense platitude that's often bandied around axiomatically. I've never been shot, I've never been raped, I've never had someone set fire to my house, I've never gotten married and had children, I've never bought a car with several missing parts, I've never lost the keys to my house nor have I ever skydived but I'm pretty damn sure I'd hate all those things. People may not know themselves perfectly (indeed, if we belief Popper then it's impossible to be objective about oneself), but we usually know our general area of interest and what we hate. From these we can fairly safely presume whether or not we'll like a thing before we've experienced it hence the "Try it, you might like it" argument fails.
the examples you gave felt to me to be out of context
(except the car and the house keys) the examples you've given are a hell of alot more extreme and life changing than trying a game genre you've not played/liked before.
borrowing a game u might not like, u risk losing an hour of you life with a potential pay off of finding something you enjoy, you are not risking violation or death.
so in the try a new genre debate, the "Try it, you might like it" answer succeeds
No, it doesn't, for the same reasons that the extreme examples don't need trying: they possess a quality which contradicts something that the individual wants.
Getting shot contradicts my desire to avoid pain, losing my house keys contradicts my desire to avoid inconvenience and a certain genre of game could potentially possess a quality which contradicts my individual desires. The examples are irrelevant, it's this underlying logic which defeats the "Try it, you might like it" advice.
EDIT: Just to rebut the obvious rebuttal to my previous point, whilst it is true that we can't instinctively know the qualities of a thing before we've experienced it (I can't
know every quality of a game I've never tried and I might mistake it to be possessing some quality which it doesn't possess (i.e. I might mistakenly assume JRPGs are repetitive)), it's at this point that the convincer/the proponent of the untested genre (in this case the OP) is supposed to show in what way the assumer/the opponent of the untested genre has mistakenly attributed negative qualities to the genre. If, after the debate is through, the proponent hasn't managed to persuade the opponent that the qualities the opponent dislikes don't really exist in the genre then the opponent needn't try the genre to know she/he dislikes it.
The problem lies in the fact that very few people are good at debating and/or we all perceive the same thing differently. The majority of debates about opinions will look like this:
A: I don't want mustard on my hotdog
B: Why?
A: Mustard is too hot.
B: But it's really nice, it goes well with hotdogs (failing to rebut the criticism).
A: No, I don't like it.
B: Have you ever tried it?
A: Yes.
B: On hotdogs?
A: No.
B: Well there you go, you should try it (again, the underlying criticism of the 'hotness' of mustard still hasn't been rebutted and it hasn't been shown how hotdogs affect this negative quality).
A: No, I don't want to.
B: Ugh, if you don't try you don't know (resorts to wanky platitudes, ad nauseum).
. I tend to respect sports game players more than sports viewers.
