Welcome to the third and final part of Why I Play Games.  This  has been a wonderful celebration of the medium, and a really enlightening experience for all of us here at Resolution.  Ultimately, it shows how wide-ranging and diverse we are as players of videogames – and, by extention, how diverse the games themselves are too.

Last week, Tom Bramwell, Chris Evans and Phill Cameron all offered drastically different takes on why they play games.  This week, if anything, shows even more variety.  Kindly joining the panel this time are Matt “SnakeLinkSonic” Armstrong, the man behind the Misanthropic Gamer blog and co-founder of the excellent Fowards Compatible; freelance games journalist with a brilliant name Barry White; Felix Bohatsch, designer of the devilishly brilliant And Yet It Moves; and one half of Tale of Tales, co-creator of The Path, Michaël Samyn.

You’ll notice Michaël’s take on the question is slightly different.  As in, instead of writing a few paragraphs on why he plays games, he’s written a thousand-word essay on why he doesn’t.

If you’ll permit some brief commentary: comparing Michaël and Barry’s answers is rather interesting.  They conflict somewhat, with Barry discussing how gaming has expanded into innumerable different styles that are barely comparable, and Michaël calling the medium out on remaining too stuck in its ways.  Without wanting to draw any conclusions or come down on either side, it is interesting to see this disparity of opinion, and could lead to some fruitful discussion.  Use the comments thread below, people.  Just keep it friendly.

Countless thanks to all the writers and developers who’ve contributed to this series.  Thanks to you lot for your own input in the original article.  Thanks for joining us on this journey of self-discovery.  It’s been emotional.

//Why I Play Games
By Matt “SnakeLinkSonic” Armstrong (Forwards Compatible, Misanthropic Gamer, GameTopius)
Why I play games – now there’s something that will shut me up. Honestly, that’s a question I could answer quite differently every time I’m asked. Though I think it’s a better question to ask my why I still play games, today I think I’ll go with one of my more common reasonings. This is where I equate it to my universally applied screen name, SnakeLinkSonic.

I commented this to another gamer on her blog yesterday (who is experiencing a sort of life-changing burnout) and I’m a bit weirded out that I have to rephrase it again now, but I’ve basically had three phases in my gaming life: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.  Now that sounds simple enough, right? Well after some thought, I can easily admit to having perceived games in three entirely different ways throughout my life. This is all in tandem to how I’ve been as a social creature. As a kid I was a bit shy but sarcastically rowdy (Sonic), and as a teen I was quite the antisocialist mute (Link). Now that I’ve moved on to full-blown misanthropic tendencies, I see that games have served an indirect purpose of making me cordially sociable to an extent (Snake). I’m still not the guy you want to invite over to dinner, but I’m a long way off from climbing the clock tower with a rifle now, and games have been a big muscle for that development.

Of course, I also play them to be entertained, awed, and to visit worlds and whatnot, but I don’t like simple answers because I don’t believe in simple questions. I’ve even gone out of my way to develop little side-projects for myself, doctrines like ‘Experiencism’ (I don’t personally adhere to escapism) that can explain away my intertwined obsession with the medium. That obsession has never dwindled for me before, not once. It only seems to grow by the day.

I play games because they operate for me in the same fashion that Cyclops’ ruby quartz visor lens does. They let me look on the reality of our little subculture without inadvertently destroying it for myself. All that my blogs and writing are simply serve as the equivalent to those concussive blasts he shoots. The fun is what I define as evil or willing to fight my little crusades for, as they’re all that really matter to me.

Games work in many ways for me, but for today I’ll just state that they serve as a special apparatus in order for me to fight to the “good” fight and be productive. The goal in life is not to eliminate misery; it’s to keep misery to the bare minimum. Humans should not strive to live to perfectly happy lives, but simply meaningful ones. Games provide meaning for me when so many other commonly professed tropes fail.

//Why I Play Games
By Barry White (freelance journalist)
I play videogames because videogames are best. As a storytelling medium, they provide opportunities for narrative interaction that’s beyond anything books and film have to offer (even if it is maddening that the last game to take true advantage of such opportunities came out nine bloody years ago). When it comes to technology, game developers are the ones starting to do the big, clever, consumer-level kinds of things sci-fi movies and novels have inspired us to imagine (hello Project Natal and Molyneux’s Milo). And in terms of form, games can be (and be about) pretty much anything. Braid, Flower, Thief, Stalker, Spore – these titles are all so different from one another that it’s a struggle to find any commonalities whatsoever beyond the fact that they are games. And I think it’s that variety, the vastness of what we can call a “game” across (and in between the cracks of) different genres, that continues to fascinate me.

[Continues...]

Last week’s feature by Daniel Lipscombe seemed to trigger something in all our minds.  It’s built from such a simple question, yet it’s one we very rarely ask ourselves, as we queue up to buy that latest blockbuster release, scour the internet for inspirational web-games, or take out that subscription to our favourite magazine.

Why are we doing these things?  What makes gaming resonate with us to such a degree?  These are questions we found too big to answer ourselves, so we did what any sensible publication would do.  We brought up our list of freelance contacts, and nagged them until they wrote something.

We’ll be publishing this in two parts – the first is below, and the second will follow this time next week.  Today, you get to enjoy the thoughts of Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell, The Reticule’s Chris Evans, and his comrade and general freelance bloke Phill Cameron.  Next week, we hope to have a couple of developers weighing in as well, along with a couple more writer-types.

This has been a thoroughly interesting topic to cover, one that’s led us to think a little more carefully about our hobby, about how important it is to us, and about how important it’s becoming in the grand scheme of things.

Right.  Who should go first?  Tom should go first, as it fits in nicely with the page’s word count.  Take it away, Mr. Bramwell…

//Why I Play Games
By Tom Bramwell (Eurogamer)
Two words: Super Play. Super Play was a British SNES magazine published when I was growing up. Writers I particularly remember include Jonathan Davies (now one half of Games Press), who once concluded a Mega Man review by declaring that, should Mega Man not up his game soon, the blue bomber’s armour would be unable to withstand the blows Davies should reign upon him. I always loved that. There was also Tony Mott (now king of Edge), Wil Overton (who drew the covers and wrote love letters to JRPGs when JRPGs were seldom seen outside J, and who I one day hope to commission for my wedding portraits – wife TBC), and Zy Nicholson (who once interviewed for a job at Eurogamer Network, and was lovely to speak to in person).

Super Play wasn’t, in hindsight, a fantastic magazine. I recently bought a full set of issues on eBay, so I’ve had time to explore them and reach that conclusion. But it was fantastic by the standards of the day. It was passionate, and opinionated, and said things that were unthinkable at the time: Donkey Kong Country wasn’t the best thing ever! Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan) was the best thing ever! Chrono Trigger wasn’t as good as FFIII! Etc! Its Top 100 Games – in issue 42, if I remember correctly [You do! - Ed] – was as wonderful an example of that feature as I’ve ever seen.

It may seem perverse to say that a games magazine is why I play games, and I was clearly playing games before I first read it, but Super Play is the reason I decided to become a games journalist, and it is therefore the reason I have played so many games, good or bad, over the many years I have done so. It drove me to things like Zelda: A Link To The Past, when nobody on my playground knew what it was; it taught me to look beyond the things I already enjoyed for inspiration. I bought Street Fighter II because of Super Play (and I had to sell my Game Gear to afford it), and Illusion of Time, and Secret of Mana. Many of the games that define my taste now are direct descendants of buying
decisions informed by that one magazine.

I wrote on Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently that I have a great affection for games that force me into sickening pause-restart cycles for hours on end (Trials 2, SSX, PGR, etc.), and they sustain me through dark times. But if I had to give credit to one institution for my infatuation with games as a whole, it would be Super Play. It didn’t make me play games, but it made me love them, which is the reason I keep playing them. From there, I’ve been helped along by id Software, Valve, Nintendo, and countless developers who seemed to anticipate my heart’s desires before I was aware of them. So thank you, Super Play. You’re the best answer to this question that I have.

[Continues...]

By Daniel Lipscombe

Editor’s Note: This article began as a short, heartfelt editorial on the positive effects of gaming when dealing with tough real-life issues.  Thanks to your help in answering Daniel’s questions via Twitter, it’s grown into something more.  It’s an exploration of the wonderful things videogames can do to us, all extrapolated from a simple question: why do you play games?

Do keep on Tweeting us with your answers, too.  We’re likely to use them in a future examination of the topic.  You can find us at www.twitter.com/ResolutionMag.

During an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine, we stumbled upon the subject of why we play videogames and hold the hobby so dearly.

His thoughts suggested that he played games as they are an interactive art form with which he held more of a connection than movies or books. An interesting point on its own, but the conversation continued, and my own response was the one that held the topic for the longest time.

Videogames have been with me since I was a child, and they were always played to entertain – something to pass time until the next episode of Knightmare or the next time a friend came to visit and we attempted to finish Rolling Thunder 2 again. The content of this entertainment always flew  over my head, even through the PlayStation era and my teenage years. Only certain moments in gaming ever strummed the heart strings as I aged mentally and physically – Aeris dying at the hands of Sephiroth and, later, the general feeling and atmosphere of ICO.

In recent years I have grown to respect story, ambience and design, and it’s these pillars that hold up many of the games that we hold dear. After learning to respect these aspects of games, my answer to why I play them has changed. Now, it’s all about escapism; the ability to press start and venture into a different world, become someone else. Talking about this escapism led me to think more about why everyday gamers press ‘start’ each day.

Everybody goes through some form of hardship in their life, and each person chooses a different way to escape these troubles. For myself and many others, it’s with a controller, or keyboard and mouse. Whether you’ve had a bad day at work or your partner has left you, you know that you have a home in Albion, the Capital Wasteland, Midgar or even on the battlefields in World War 2.

This escapism has never been more prominent to me than in the last two years. In February 2007, my three-year-old daughter passed away as the result of a car accident. My life fell apart, and I was on a knife edge, ready to jump into a chasm. But I escaped. Picking up a controller allowed me to step away from these problems. I absorbed every game that was released at the time, and each one took me away from my problems and challenged me, albeit in a material and competitive way, giving me something to strive for.

It’s my belief that videogames have the ability to transport you away from life in a more in-depth way than other forms of entertainment. Typically, you’ll be taking on the role of characters who have their own problems, but their problems nearly always have a solution – be it by finding an exit, shooting their way out, finding the princess or winning the tournament. There’s often a resolution at the end that leaves you with the contentment of achieving something, and in a world full of so many problems this can only be a positive thing. The game pad or mouse gives you a sense of control that’s so difficult to attain in life.

[Continues...]