Why I Play Games: The Panel – Part II
Games satisfy my overriding need to interact with the media I consume as much as possible. I remember as a child watching TV shows and movies and imagining what it would be like to be a character in such things. I enjoyed watching the stories play out in front of me but I always desperately wanted to become more involved some how. I wanted to drive in that car chase or be the one to save the damsel from her distress. I wanted to create as much of an impact on what I was experiencing as it was having on me. Games give me the chance to do things like that, to however limited a degree. I’d like to think we’re not passive consumers of media. I think about the things that I watch and read, I discuss them with friends, I read articles and watch videos about other things that I’ve read and seen. The nature of gaming feeds into my desire to actively engage – the controller gives me a way to push back, to play with what I’m experiencing as I experience it. Even if I’m having minimal impact on events, I at least feel like I’m helping to form my own unique impressions of whatever I’m playing. I’m getting an experience no one else will have.
Does that sound a bit mental or pretentious? I don’t know. I like games for many of the same reasons other people do (wish fulfilment, escapism, being able to blow all manner of shit up) but the roots of my continuing desire and interest exist not just with the kind of content games provide, but with the manner in which that content is delivered.
//Why I Play Games
By Felix Bohatsch (Broken Rules, developers of And Yet It Moves)
There are a few aspects of digital games that make me play them. The ones I want to highlight today are playing in a social context, immersing myself in a single experience and the fact that digital games a relatively new medium that has lots of places to grow into.
I still get the most fulfilment out of games when I play them together with friends and colleagues. For me personally, that also means playing in the same room – that is, being physically present – but I don’t think that this is necessity for everyone. It’s great when you get into a frenzy together and everything gets a bit chaotic, because that just pushes everyone involved a bit more into the game. For me, it also doesn’t really matter if it’s competitive or cooperative, because at the end everyone has gained something from the others, and the group will have accomplished something together, even if it’s just a great time. Examples for these situations I enjoy a lot are Wii Sports, Galcon and Pro Evolution Soccer.
Often, it doesn’t even mean that everyone in the room needs to play. I had great times solving single-player games with friends around, just passing the controller and discussing problems and solutions. This way, you share the problems, but also the accomplishments. I loved playing Gran Turismo with my brother, solving Zack & Wiki with a friend and living through the tension of PixelJunk Monsters with two playing and two more friends shouting where to place the towers.
Sometimes there’s no one around, though, and then I still have the urge to play a game. When I play alone I’m either looking for games that give me the feeling of empowerment, or for deeper, story-like experiences. I love games that put me into a flow-like state, where I have the feeling of skill and control while being at the edge of loosing at the same time. Many smaller puzzle games like Peggle, Bit.Trip Beat or Flight Control pull me in through this. But I also love to be able to creatively explore a game’s rule set, where the main mechanics give enough freedom so that various different ways of play emerge. This way I can once again get into a very paidiac play state – that is unstructured play, like when I was a child – which gives me a feeling of creative empowerment. Powder Game and Little Big Planet have been recent experiences like that.
It’s great, though, when games manage to mix these two kinds of play – games that demand skill and control, while allowing enough freedom to experiment with the rule set and the environment these are placed in. It’s usually these games that I completely get lost in, like Flower, World of Goo, Katamari Damacy or Zen Bound. Rarely – but that much more significantly – do I find a game that manages to tell me a story through playing it. Still, this is one of the main points why I play games, because it can make the story feel more meaningful when you experience it through interactivity. It hasn’t happened often yet to me, but ICO and Shadow of the Colossus have left a deep impact and made me crave for more experiences like them.
Lastly, I play games because I also make them, and I want to see what great stuff others make with our new medium. It’s great to be part of a medium that has just recently started to grow and change and will do so even more. I think there are lots of places digital games still have to go to, and ultimately – for me as a gamer – that means lots of chances to be surprised, amazed and immersed.
//Why I Don’t Play Games
By Michaël Samyn (Tale of Tales, developers of The Path / The Graveyard)
I don’t play videogames. I really want to. But I don’t. I often try. Again and again. But games cannot keep me interested for long. It used to be different. Maybe games have changed. Maybe I have. Probably both.
Not to play videogames is not remarkable. Most people don’t. It’s still a marginal hobby. But not to play videogames while really wanting to is strange. My demand is greater than the supply.
[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.