Why I Play Games: The Panel – Part II
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...]
[...] “Why I Play Games” at Resolution Posted on August 6, 2009 by imperialcreed Resolution Magazine has been running a two part feature on why people play games. Various bods from within and without the games industry have contributed, and I was humbled to be among so many so much cleverer than myself. The second and final part of the feature went up today, and you can read my thoughts and musings from the likes of Felix “And Yet It Moves” Bohatsch by clicking on the pretty words below. I play videogames because videogames are best. [...]
Wow I’m surprised, I actually agree a lot with The Path guy, I thought i wouldn’t but he says something that is really true. The medium isn’t pushed enough, and actually has taken a step backwards i feel. No on is even trying to make games like deus Ex or Thief anymore, they just seem content with copying Gears of War/Call of Duty.
[...] Have a read and let me know what you think. Am I crazy? Do you feel the same? Is there still hope? Or should we just move on to something else? Or are the other writers right? Are their reasons for playing games more pertinent than mine not to? Oddly, it seems that several of them feel the same about the scarcity of really good games and the lack of evolution, but this does not lead them to stop playing as it does me. Posted by Michaël Samyn on August 6, 2009 | Filed Under: Press, Thoughts [...]
I have been posting on the Steam forums recently after playing The Path and I have to disagree with the feeling that games are utter failures all of the time. You not playing games to me is like a director saying they don’t watch movies because they hate superhero flicks. I am just as enraged as you when it comes to always being treated like the master of the universe lately or even the messiah. One of my favorite games of all time is the original F.E.A.R. because the more you learn in the story the more you realize you are a horrible abomination who probably shouldn’t be alive and is actually a part of the horror on the world now. Granted the story was taken largely from Japanese films, but there was depth. The recent FEAR 2 was hardly like that at all. You were the superhuman dude who the girl in the group fawned over and crazy music played while you killed all the faceless baddies. Yeah they threw a twist at you in the end, but it was far from the engrossing world or the original.
I have had the same experience recently with playing the old Neverwinter Nights 2 and the add on Mask of the Betrayer. I often stop at the beauty and fluidity of the setting and story in Mask of the Betrayer. Even if it is ego centric in some ways, it is far less a story that is about how cool you are compared to everyone else. While that is a page out of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, that your uniqueness is a curse…it is the comprehensive presentation in Mask of the Betrayer that makes it beautiful.
And each of these examples is a game. Yes it is not doing anything new and different, but there is a beauty that comes from how it was put together on the base. Not all mystery novels are made equally and neither are all horror shooters and fantasy rpgs. Remember Casablanca is just war propoganda at heart, it is just beautifully put together propaganda.
I have to wonder though if you missed out on World of Goo because you hate puzzles for being objectives or skipped Bioshock because it is just a rip off of System Shock 2. The art in those world they create and even retelling the same story with different design, is worth the repeated looks in gaming just as it is in literature and film.
Don’t let the blockbusters get to you, just because a medium isn’t niche anymore doesn’t mean it isn’t capable.
I think you’ve missed some of Samyn’s point. F.E.A.R. or Neverwinter Nights aren’t what the creative mind appreciates not due to overly high standards but due to a lack of awareness of the nature of the medium (for the record I quite liked F.E.A.R., I just wouldn’t call it meaningful or a creative marvel, or even a creative stepping stone for that matter).
F.E.A.R. (and nearly every other contemporary FPS, and most games of other genres too) fails at depth because it is little more than a bog-standard FPS with a few set pieces and a semi-interesting story played out via FMVs and dialogue, the two lack the integration required to have made anything really worthwhile.
Carrying over the exact same game dynamics and merely changing the plot is simply not good enough, it becomes nothing more than a really advanced version of those “Choose Your Own Adventure” story books. Immersion these days is nothing more than the same typical atmosphere dynamics that have been reused ad infinitum for the past two decades.
Have you ever played The Path? If not I’d recommend it, it blends plot, gameplay, interaction, freedom and atmosphere perfectly into a wonderfully innovative concoction. It’s not about being sandboxey or full of shocks, those are simple, predictable set pieces, The Path instead lets the players make the story themselves and lures them into a world where the horror is made by the paranoid expectations of the player themself and not always the virtual world they inhabit.
And of course there’s all the things entailed with the term “art”, meaning, purpose, exploration, etc. What existential commentary does F.E.A.R. or Halo provide? What mention of metaphysical philosophy does Deus Ex offer? But I won’t go that much farther into that lest I start sounding too much like an over-obsessive fan of The Path (no I don’t work for their marketting department =] ) I just really sympathise with their manifesto.
Though I enjoy video games on a regular basis I have a growing disdain for the meaningful merit of the shelf of games I have in my room. Like Samyn said, they’re little more than things to kill time before supper and television, and in a way that’s fine, even the wisest of minds must take the time for mindless entertainment occasionally, it’s just they’re not things to feel inspired or given further meaning by. But as with any medium I think it’s just a matter of time before it’s potential becomes realised. Painting started as nothing more than 2D emulation of real life images before it became an expressive art form after all. People like Tale Of Tales are just the sorts to take steps towards that hopeful future. =]
Michaël Samyn is 100% correct. Video games aren’t what they could’ve been today. Nowadays people only develop video games to make money. Very few games created today aren’t even creative.
Oops, sorry for double post. I meant to say very few games created today ARE creative.
My mind doesn’t seem to work unless I simply write things out, so this might seem disorganized to read, so apologies.
Before looking at why I play games, it’s important to dissect why games exist in the first place; certainly, books, movies, TV, et al can fill the same void games do with regards to story, worlds, characters, morals, symbolism, et al. Yes, the approach is different, but the results would ultimately be the same.
Of course, this is overly simplistic, and would make any medium redundant since we can simply orate the story. Video games have some obvious benefits; fewer length restrictions than any other medium available with wide distribution, low development costs offering one-man designers to produce something enjoyable, et al. Going deeper, and I imagine this is what Michael was getting at, there is an opportunity to dissect worlds, characters, thoughts, ideas, symbolism, what have you, in a way no other medium can. For instance, back when Bioshock was first introduced, I was excited at the thought of the Little Sisters; from the POV of the player, killing them was beneficial, yet the morale of the player was called into question, as they were little girls who were entirely harmless to the player This idea was, of course, watered down in the final product.
The point being, games today simply don’t push the boundaries of exploring things such as our morals, beliefs, etc. like they can. Even going backwards, worlds are rarely worth exploring, and designers simply see games as a means to create their big action film without going through the Hollywood machine. To this, I agree with Michael.
BUT! There is more to games than that. A whole, WHOLE lot more to them than that. More than I care to wildly rant about without writing out first.
Anyways, very interesting.
[...] Resolution’s three-part feature on the matter concluded with a thousand-word piece by Michael Samyn, half of Tale of Tales and one of the brains behind – [...]
Michaël Samyn: try playing some modern board and card games for more than two players, a very different experience from the one-person “interactive puzzles” that bore you. (I’m not talking about traditional games like Monopoly (crap) and Risk (mediocre).) PEOPLE provide the major interest in games, and you can’t get that without a game that has at least two, and preferably more, separate sides/interests. Those are rare in the video game world, and often poorly executed. Tabletop RPGs, too, can be very different from the computer kind, but “that depends” on a lot of things.
“Shock me! Give me something unexpected! Show me something beautiful! Seduce me! Confuse me! Stop treating me like a retard who has nothing better to do than pressing buttons and solving puzzles.”
That is, I think, a fundamental friction between the “entertainment” group and the “art” group. As a student who reads a lot of fiction and often enjoys and admires it, I also feel often annoyed at all the darkness and arrogance of so much serious writing, which actually usually dissolves into not so much, if viewed by real-life philosophical standards. It is then when I fall in love again with mere entertainment which can sometimes provide more liberty of thought.