Why I Play Games: The Panel - Part II
So why do I want to play games? It’s not to relive the experiences that I had with games when I used to enjoy them. I was much younger then, in my early to mid twenties. That’s probably why I could tolerate all the things that frustrate me now. I was also actively involved with visual arts back then, so I didn’t have any expectations of depth and meaning from my games. I could get that elsewhere.
Back then, videogames inspired me. I was only barely aware of the fact that these experiences were games. For me, they felt like travels into fantastic worlds. I was immersed in them. Even though I had no interest in the actual narrative elements of those games. I think I was hoping to recreate the experience into my own artwork, with content that did matter to me. Back then, it didn’t occur to me that videogames could evolve into something more. They were just games.
As time went on, however, videogames started to show some signs of maturity. Here and there a serious topic was addressed. And the rules-based activity was relaxed to allow for more space for atmosphere and story. Suddenly videogames were showing a kind of potential. The interactivity was starting to be used to enhance the immersion, to drag you deeper into the fiction. I remember that at that point I had an outspoken preference for playing games as opposed to watching movies. I couldn’t bear the thought of passively sitting through a story.
But it feels like the supply dried up very quickly. There were only a few games that could really offer this alternative. And part of the experience was probably caused by the novelty of it all. The experience of real emotions and real thought and clever design in a videogame was new to me.
It was in this period that I started to make videogames myself. So maybe that is what caused me to lose interest. I had learned that videogames had great potential as a medium. And slowly, as I was trying to make these things myself, this potential grew and grew in my eyes. Maybe I was overestimating the medium (or the human capacity to realize its
potential). But I think my expectations must have risen during that time.
Simultaneously it feels like - though I realise that this may be highly subjective in the light of the above - videogames actively refused to fulfil their promise. As the medium became more commercially successful, the content that games dealt with became more banal. As the designers continued to refine the addictive interaction mechanics, they seemed to loose track of the purpose of all this interaction. Or at least what I perceived as its purpose: immersion and the conveying and generation of meaning. The stories became mere excuses for yet another round of patronising challenge-and-reward. The challenges slowly turning into assessing your ability to do exactly what the game wanted you to do, instead of allowing you to explore the possibilities and be creative.
Nowadays, games don’t inspire me any more. Space marines, World War 2 soldiers, ninjas, zombies, superheroes, under-cover agents. It seems like the designers are not even trying any more!
I don’t want to be a hero. I don’t want to be a champion. I don’t want to be The One Who Saves The Universe. I don’t want to win - especially not from a computer of which I know it can play the game better than I ever could. I want a real challenge. An emotional and intellectual challenge. A human challenge. Instead of some carefully constructed cat-and-mouse game that only exists to consume my time. 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.
There is so much potential in videogames. So much potential for greatness. The medium of videogames is a godsend in these troubling and confusing times. Its intimacy, interactivity, non-linearity and emergence offer us the tool of choice for communicating about very complicated and fascinating contemporary issues. But instead videogames today are simplistic, deal with stale subjects, treat the players like morons and offer no emotional or intellectual depth, in favour of attempting to please your ego on some caveman level at every turn.
Ultimately the question itself - of “why we play videogames” - reveals a problem with the medium. Nobody asks us why we watch movies or read novels. The more pertinent question in that respect would be why we liked a particular novel or enjoyed a certain movie more than another. Being able to ask why we play videogames basically means that all videogames are the same. And lack of variety equals lack of maturity. Which means they are not worthy of serious debate or consideration.
My hope for the future of videogames is fading fast. Publishers, developers and players all seem extremely content with the current state of affairs. Even the projects that pass for “alternative” or “artistic” employ the same abusive tricks as their commercial brethren. But who can blame children for wanting candy? Every day it becomes more clear that if there is any hope for the interactive medium, it lies outside of videogames. And videogames will remain just games: the things you play with your children at your parents’ house on a rainy Sunday afternoon, just to kill some time before supper and television.
[...] “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.