Sunday 27 February 2011

Why I like video games.

There are a lot of reasons people like playing video games.  They might enjoy an escape into the simple and fantastical; they might have been suckered by variable ratio reinforcement mechanics; they might like the fact that video games have now cemented a twee and affectionate position in popular culture, and stand for the underdog who got beaten up at school because he was more into DnD than football. They might just unreflectively embrace the fact that they find them fun.

At least, that's why I play video games sometimes. Other times I do so for countless reasons more banal, and still other times it's out of a genuine, considered and distracting fascination.  This latter might, perhaps, be broadly explained below:

Games as art
I think enough people have understood that video gaming isn’t just a puerile distraction for me to forego an apology for it as a serious pastime here. What I believe, however, is that we haven’t really seriously considered that they occupy a space on the artistic landscape which isn’t quite filled by anything else.  I believe games can have a scale and subtlety comparable to that of a novel; that they can show scenes which make them as filmic as many cinematic efforts out there today; that the possible variety of visual styles they offer can rival that of graphic novels.  But just as all of those forms of art have idiosyncrasies which can never be replicated by other media, so too do games. It may simply be that it’s the interactivity and player involvement that fills this role, but I'm reluctant to be definitive on the question.

Games as education
Games seem to teach you things quite without you realising it. I don’t mean edutainment; rather I mean that bizarre way that you just know that falling down a hole or touching an goomba without jumping on it is A Bad Idea after playing Super Mario for two minutes. That kind of knowledge is non-rational, instinctive; it’s the kind of knowledge that means that you can speak a foreign language without consciously conjugating verbs - certain sentences just feel like they’re right.  I’m channelling Jonathan Blow here, but your potential to learn from games really hasn’t been tapped, and I wonder at what might be possible if we turned game mechanics to a purpose more useful and enriching than getting a better kill/death ratio.  Jane Mcgonical says that a total of 5.93 million years has been spent playing World of Worldcraft since it went online. Whilst I’m not interested in debating whether WoW taught those players anything valuable, imagine, for the sake of argument, that it had? 

That’s roughly what I mean when I say I’m into games, and that's roughly why I'm going to be writing about them on this blog.  Please note, my knowledge is by no means encyclopedic, I probably won't stay up to date and I don’t play nearly as many games as some people I know. I’ll put up stupid stuff like a Final Fantasy recreation of Jersey shore because I really like the culture, and I’ll get excited about Arkham Asylum 2 because, well, the first one was really really great to play. But I’m also a reflective gent, and just like I do in other aspects of my life, occasionally I’ll play a game or hear a piece of news and get a bit serious. But only a bit.

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