For a short month and one coming off a gargantuan post-holiday game bonanza, you might think I’d take it a little bit easy, maybe fixate some on a few of January’s bounty. Instead, find out what happens when my budget widens just a little and the activity on Goozex picks up significantly.
I play games.
I play a lot of games, as a matter of fact. I play games all the time, in all aspects of my life. I create games. I purchase games. I turn mundane activities into little Calvinball-style games. I talk about games. I think about games, have conversations about them and debate their relative merits.
As a gamer, things like this forum at the recent Game Developers Conference get under my skin. The general thought process that leads people to think that games can be in some way significant isn’t what irritates me because I think games can be artistic, even capital-A “Art” and I think they can be socially significant and of course I believe they can enrich lives both by their discrete nature and by offering perspectives that may otherwise be difficult to grasp. But the deeper implication being pushed by this kind of self-important wankery—that games which do not aspire to Art or social relevance aside from their base value as “game” are somehow broken or useless—is what chaps my hide.
At its core, a game exists to entertain. Games create a parameterized experience by mechanically defining activity: The ruleset for a game dictates how “play” is conducted. But the function is to facilitate the entertainment. Obviously one could play Monopoly by moving as many squares as you wish each turn and collecting arbitrary or negotiated sums from those who land on your property, the “rules” exists only so far as the players adhere to them. But designers build their games from the perspective that the greatest enjoyment will come from participating within their suggested confines.
To suggest then that a game should aspire to something greater than entertainment first and foremost is to miss the point almost completely. Like a movie that is filmed solely to educate or repudiate, that goal may be achieved but only the masochistic or unwilling are likely to experience it because film’s principal motivation is entertainment. Those films which do offer commentary or open conversational doorways tend to do so effectively by remembering to first entertain and secondarily enlighten. This is particularly true with games, since I can imagine nothing more laborious than a socially relevant or intellectually stimulating game that failed to be enjoyable.
Playing games, for me, serves a number of purposes, because games offer a bevy of ancillary benefits aside from passing the time. For example, I play role-playing, multiplayer video games and party/board games because, again, I enjoy them but also I find that social interaction is much more readily achieved through shared play. I play single-player video games because in addition to being enjoyable I like the narrative aspects that are presented to be (very generally) more engaging than other narratives, certainly because I can incorporate play into a typically one-way experience. I engage in role-playing activities beyond mere play like game mastering and world building because it gives me a chance to use a defined framework for narrative creation and to share that creativity with others through a game context (back to the social element). I design games and formulate game elements within non-game activities to obviate the tedium of a typically unpleasant task or to exercise my capacity to add parameters to a broad and complex system that captures the essence of the subject at hand. I play historical games to provide an enjoyable context to educational pursuits.
And so on. There are strategy games that exercise my mind in ways other activities cannot, there are games with controversial themes that spark debate, there are visionary games that challenge assumptions, games that expand vocabularies… but more significant than all of that, there are games that are simply fun. Games that are pure game, like Yahtzee or Peggle or Tag or Hearts. These are games that require credibility-straining levels of effort to place into any sort socially relevant context and yet exist and thrive because plainly they are fun. To dismiss or chastise these games or even games like Gears of War or Warhammer Fantasy Role-Playing or Fluxx which may potentially be cast as failures for their lack of lofty aspirations is missing the point entirely. Games don’t exist to try and “matter,” games matter because they exist.
A queue of PSP titles that had been sitting in my Goozex requests list dropped into my mailbox over the weekend and since most of the home console games I’m playing now felt a little stale, I spent a lot of time hunched over the portable PlayStation. I did manage to squeeze in some non-PSP gaming as well, but to see my thoughts on the controversial Manhunt 2, initial impressions of Jeanne D’Arc and thoughts on Flash games, forge ahead.
My wife bought me an Xbox Live Vision camera for Valentine’s Day (well, I think it was for Valentine’s Day… she also bought me a new pair of boots so I’m not sure whether they were both gifts or if one was just her being nice) that I attempted to put to good (?) use this weekend. I also wrapped up a great PS3 game, discovered a great puzzle title on XBLA and considered the value of multiple goals in simple, casual-style games.
Want to know more? It’s all below.
The way that visual media has been intertwined with accompanying audio is like a dense ivy growing over a chain link fence. In theory, they could be separated, but the realistic mind will admit they are functionally singular. I find this fascinating because while we enjoy activities that involve a single sense (music, books), somehow there is a presentation format of the generated or filmed motion picture that it seems cannot be acknowledged without some sort of auditory component.
I suppose it has to do with the motivation of the medium. With books or music the experience is internal, abstracted by design to create a (allow me to borrow a modern phrase for an old concept) user-generated experience. However the explicit and external descriptions presented by film, theater, games, even music performed live is reliant on spectacle and for that to be effective we have, long ago, determined that accessing multiple senses is most effective at captivation.
But we don’t even really notice the distinction any longer, except maybe when it is absent. A filmmaker can create a certain tension by excising the soundtrack from a scene, for example. What I find interesting though is that it has become such an integral part of this type of media that it often fades to the background in deference to the principal visual aspect. Which is why so many games that have captured people’s attention lately are interesting because they take that sort of secondary audio element and push it to the forefront and come up with something that effectively narrows the gap between performer and audience.
Of course, this is principally true in the world of games.
After a couple weeks there in January where I posted hundreds of Achievement Points, the recent arrival of the PSP and the PS3 has made my pursuit of gamerscore wane a bit. And while I certainly played 360 this weekend, I didn’t do so with score-boosting as a motivation. As such, I played just to play and… well, it was kind of nice, really. I also got some more play time in on the PS3 and began to see the difference in design philosophies between “grown up” kiddie games and games that are actually for kids.