On Choosing a Role

[This is all straight-up personal blathering about me playing Dragon Age games, talking it through to myself in more than 140 characters.]

One of the things I'm really noticing this week, while adventuring (and occasionally struggling) through Dragon Age: Origins, is to just what a high degree subconscious and indirect cues affect my perception of a game.

The first time I tried DA:O, I played a female city elf.  That's a character who has it pretty bad, all things considered: the city elves are a thoroughly disenfranchised, oppressed, despised people who live in a literal ghetto.  The origin story basically involves attempting to rescue a cousin from rape and on the way out giving a whole bunch of oppressors a sword to the face because they're there, among other things.

On that first run of the game, I made it to the battle of Ostagar, then got turned around twice somehow trying to get to the tower and light the beacon -- so really, not very far at all.  The entirety of my opinion on the game was based on the origin chapter, and my take was that Ferelden was a perilously grim and serious world, and that the Warden was a cynical, jaded, sarcastic person.  The Warden, in that game, stood in the gutter under the totem pole of society's hierarchy and had nothing to lose, but everything to gain.

I didn't feel like exploring the city elf story again this time, because I already had, and woodland elves never really were my sort of thing.  Neither are magic users, and I didn't feel like being a dwarf, so I rolled a human.  The only origin for non-mage humans, though, is Human Noble.  I also had some indecision, some mouse jitter, and a rather large glass of wine while I was customizing my would-be Warden in the character creator, and as a result some of her physical attributes are not what I ordinarily would have chosen.  Basically,  her eyes are enormous.

The end result is a character I did not expect: I now have a Disney-eyed deposed heir to a minor throne, who grew up in a full life of privilege and plenty, comfort and love.  This Warden, while still "me" in a sense as all my characters are, is a me of decades long gone.  She's the me I would have thought at 14 that I'd want to be -- young and idealistic, but trying oh so very hard to do the right thing in the world.

As a result of the character's backstory and appearance, I've realized I'm actually playing a much shallower game than my first pass.  This Warden is straight out of a fairy tale, and she knows it -- and she believes the world actually works that way.  I the player actually found myself squirming in mild embarassment in my chair last night (thank goodness the spouse was too immersed in multiplayer assassinating to notice) when I realized how very juvenile I felt my approach to the whole game becoming.

So juvenile.  Because I had every intention of deliberately avoiding the Alistair romance.  I know in advance, thanks to years of spoilers floating around, what the Warden's options are going to be, to stamp out the Blight.  I had a feel for what would be the right thing to do, in this game, and when I played the sequel first I told it that's what had happened.  Maybe the Warden and Zevran could have one really good before-the-world-ends romp, just for fun.

But then this Warden happened.  And something possessed me and honest to god now I'm playing fanfiction or something, I don't even know, but all those dialogue options came up at the bottom of the screen and my hand picked "hey let's go make out and be in love like teenagers" and now my brain is getting drunk in the corner out of disgust while Alistair and the Warden make puppy eyes at each other.  And they're such dorks, and I'm such a softie, that now I know I don't have it in me to make the "right" choice anymore, and Wynne was right to give her lecture, and I was all, "No, mom, I know what I'm doing" and *headdesk*.

I barged into Ferelden and felt like The Doctor: just this once, everybody lives!

I think some of it's a reaction to external factors.  I've been thinking about Mass Effect 3 and discussing it with a lot of other gamers lately, and I expect that game to be nothing but a wall of impossible choices, destruction, really upsetting character deaths, and sacrifices for the good of the many.  (In fact, the game cannot be nearly as tragic and joyless as I imagine it will be, because no-one would play it.  Still: grim.)  Somehow I'm not only choosing to spend March immersed in that drama, I'm also looking forward to it.  So some part of my spirit is rebelling.  Like a little child, I'm throwing a massive tantrum and declaring that this time, the hero gets the prince and that everyone lives happily ever after.  (Except the bad people.  Naturally.)

The end result, though, is that I'm playing a totally different game than I thought I was -- and a totally different game than the one I thought I'd use to set up Dragon Age 2.  DA2, to me, is more like the way the me-of-today perceives the world.  Hawke is a person who has been through some traumatizing events, surrounded by some likewise damaged people.  She and her friends have all come to each other as a family of choice, after losing their blood families, and they make their way through life in this big strange city together, knowing the others are out there.  They have each other's backs, even the crabby ones. 

That's the game I played.

The Warden has a different cast around her.  They're loyal to her, more or less, or at least becoming that way, but their backgrounds are not like hers.  Every one of them, except maybe Leliana, is in some way an outcast from mainstream society: Sten the qunari, Alistair the bastard, Wynne the circle mage, Morrigan the apostate, Shale the golem, Zevran the elf fleeing his failure...

But this Warden is of a noble house.  True, her family died around her due to backstabbing, disloyalty, greed, and politics -- but the lives of the nobility were always thus.  Her personal tragedy is still the mainstream story of her society.  In short, she has buckets of privilege.  And although she may be camping in the woods with a gang of misfits for now, the arc of her story has her heading back to power and privilege later.

That's the game I seem to be playing.


The reason I think it's worth playing is because when my husband sat down and spent dozens of hours on Dragon Age: Origins, he saw the story of a young man: a circle mage who had to bear the gift and curse of magical talent and who met a pretty red-haired Orlesian bard he couldn't resist.  Another friend sat down with the game and found the story of a dwarf, who had to manage culture and politics and found the Wardens as an unexpected refuge.  And then of course there's the city elf whose story I didn't finish: she would have been constantly in an uphill fight, with her gender and her race aligned against her, until earning enough respect to lead the fight against the darkspawn in the end.

So very many different games...

There are still a lot of things I don't like about Dragon Age: Origins in the realm of its mechanics and design.  And I think as an experience, I actually still like Dragon Age 2 better.  Its characters feel more real, its city feels more navigable, and since I really didn't buy the game for its dungeon delving I couldn't care less that all mines have the same floor plan.  But finding out what kind of story I choose to tell, and how that story and I both change at whim, has been a really interesting experience.

(And now I know that some part of me, deep inside, never did let go of that Disney upbringing.)

Win, Lose, or Fail

A bunch of gaming writers have recently cycled back around to one of the most foundational questions of our art.  No matter what perspective each of us prefers, no matter which lens each of us uses, down at the bottom there's a single question even more important than the perennial argument of "Are games art?"

Our core issue is this: what are video games?

Michael Abbott over at The Brainy Gamer launched this most recent salvo with Games Aren't Clocks:

I say it's time to let go of our preoccupation with gameplay as the primary criterion upon which to evaluate a game's merits. It's time to stop fetishizing mechanics as the defining aspect of game design. Designers must be free to arrange their priorities as they wish - and, increasingly, they are. Critics, too, must be nimble and open-minded enough to consider gameplay as one among many other useful criteria on which to judge a game's quality and aspirations.

This caused a nearly instant rejoinder from journalist Dennis Scimeca at his personal blog, Punching Snakes, in which he asserted that actually, Games ARE Clocks:

Video games can afford to suffer some modicum of technical errors and still be playable – we routinely look past the regularly-scheduled bugs in Bethesda titles all the time without letting them ruin our fun – but if their mechanics are so broken so as to preclude play? Without play, there is no game, at which point nothing else matters.

I think the salient aspect of Abbott’s post starts midway through, when he expresses his frustration with the term “video game.” Rather than trying to redefine what the term means, in order to fit everything inside the same, comfortable box, however, I think we need new language entirely.

A few paragraphs later, he continues:

I might argue that The Sims has never been a video game, for the same lack of victory conditions. It is a simulation, a digital sandbox, and winning or losing has nothing to do with it. When competition ceases to be part of the equation, I think an object’s definition as a game should immediately be called into question. We don’t do this because even if we determined that “video game” no longer works as a descriptor, we have no fallback positions or options available.

It's an interesting debate, to me, because I think that in their own ways, both gentlemen are quite right.  Games are more than the sum of their mechanics, to many of us, and the word "game" is also loaded with connotations that may not apply to our modern interactive narratives.

Where I've gotten caught up, though, is in this idea of "winning" and "losing."  I don't think they've been the right terms to discuss game completion for a very long time.  BioShock isn't chess,  Plants vs Zombies isn't basketball, and Tetris isn't poker.  How do you decide if you're "winning" the character arc of Mass Effect, Fallout: New Vegas, or Fable III?

At its most basic, a game is something playable.  Whether it's got a story or not, no matter the genre, system, or type, a game is something that requires player input.  You, the consumer, are in some way integral to this experience.  Whether you push one button or speak a word into a microphone, whether you wave your arms at a motion sensor or deliberately hold still when you could act -- a game requires you to contribute.  That's the sum total of the agreement on our current definition of "gaming," and really that's quite a low bar.  Small wonder, then, that we keep looping through these arguments.

We don't just have a win / lose dichotomy anymore.  We do have completion and backlog; we have sandbox and short story.  But every title I can think of -- every title I've ever played and a thousand more I haven't -- has either a failure state or a success metric, and some have both.  Our metrics aren't necessarily competitive, and they might be imposed by the player rather than intrinsically by the game.  There are little successes and big ones, game-ending failures and completely surmountable ones, but every pixellated problem I've ever pounced on has at least one or the other.

(If at first you don't succeed, you fail.)

Writing about L. A. Noire and death in gaming back to back started me down the path of contemplating the failure state in general.  I hadn't really given it any thought before, but recently I've started to understand just how important it is.  Coupling the failure state with the success state (and no, they are not necessarily binary opposites) creates pretty much our entire dynamic of gaming.

Depending on the sort of player you are, this is either a total failure, or a smashing success.

While I was starting to muse aloud on this idea on Twitter, Mattie and Line challenged me with The Sims.  That challenge leads to a critical point: player-determined goals are still crucial goals.  Your Sims can fail at their own little lives: going hungry, getting fired, burning the house down, or getting dumped by SimSpouse.  But it is common to play the game aiming for maximum drama in SimLives -- so, the argument runs, those aren't failure states at all.  They're successes.  That's all well and good, but the players who want SimHouse to burn down still have failure conditions available: the scenario in which the house, in fact, does not burn down.  The standard failure and success metrics, as envisioned by the designers, might be reversed but there are still measurable goals present, waiting to be accomplished. 

To a certain extent, most success goals can be said to be player-determined.  What's true success in Peggle: beating the story mode, or going back for an Ace and a 100% on every level?  What's good enough in Tetris: getting to level 10?  Beating your own old high score?  Beating someone else's?  What's a successful play-through of Mass Effect: paragon, renegade, or somewhere in between?

Even in Minecraft, the most popular sandbox to come along in gaming since die were first rolled for stat sheets, there are successes and failures.  Both wear many faces, of course.  But success can look like this:

Image source: http://www.kevblog.co.uk/how-to-build-a-hollow-sphere-in-minecraft/

And failure can look (comically) like this:

Creation and destruction are player goals, rather than creator goals, but the game itself is still a set of tools that enables the player to achieve those goals (building a nice house, which is the sum of many smaller goals) or fail in them (committing accidental arson while installing the fireplace).

A huge amount of our gaming, though, is deliberately narrative.  Most of the games that I play certainly are.  This year alone has seen me in Fable III, Portal 2, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, Fallout: New Vegas, Bastion, L.A. Noire, both Mass Effect titles, and another dozen or two that I can't immediately call to mind.  These are all cinematic stories, designed with beginnings, middles, and ends; the mechanics of their telling are a vehicle to carry us from plot point to plot point, mainly via weaponry.

Stories don't have failure conditions, but they do have endings.  Story-based games often have clear fail states, though, and that's the game over screen.  Your character has died, or the setback you face is so adverse there can be no overcoming it.  Game over, mission failed, you suck at shooting bad guys so your planet is destroyed.  Go back to a save point and try again.

Of course, sometimes they're just kidding about "game over."

But a game like Mass Effect doesn't need to rely as heavily on the fail states (though the game over screen most certainly exists), because its relying on the player input to define the character.  We care about keeping Shepard alive in the face of certain doom, but we tend to care more about whether she aims for diplomatic solutions, or shoots a guy in the face.  A failure state in Mass Effect 2 doesn't look like the game over screen given to the player if a mission goes bad; it looks like being unable to keep one of your crew members loyal, or like being unable to keep one in line.  We're playing to achieve the successes, in whichever form we feel they take, rather than to avoid the failures.

Most narrative games don't take the "define this character for yourself" trajectory that BioWare titles are famous for, of course, but they still rely on that delicate combination of success and failure.  If you're playing Phoenix Wright, the game is completely on rails.  But it has fail states: you can press the wrong statement or present the wrong evidence.  You need to have a decent understanding of what's going on in order to make correct accusations and put the evidence together properly.  And you can get it wrong to the point of seeing a "game over" screen.  (Unless you're me, and save compulsively, and reload if you're doing badly.)  Success in meeting goals -- finding evidence, correctly questioning a witness, or surviving a cross-examination -- will advance the story to the next set of goals. 

Purple's the evil one.

My most beloved games of old literally do not have a fail state.  The classic LucasArts SCUMM-engine adventure games -- Monkey Island 1 and 2; Day of the Tentacle, Loom, and more -- were revolutionary in that the player literally could not get permanently stuck or die.  (As compared to the Sierra adventure games of the era, which were death-happy, or to older games like Zork, where you could waste hours playing on past the point where you'd already screwed yourself over.)  Rather than ending with failure, the games rely on continued success.  These stories have natural bottlenecks built in: the narrative will not continue until you figure out what Bernard should do with that hamster or how Guybrush can use the rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle.  There are items that need to be found, contraptions that need to be built, and discussions that need to be had in order for the player to progress.

In a sense, these games -- of which you could easily argue L.A. Noire is the most recent descendant -- are very proactive.  Reliance on cut-scenes is very low and mainly, non-playable sequences are just showing the consequences of whatever action the player just took.  The absence of a game over screen may remove a certain kind of tension from the story, but it also removes a major source of potential frustration for the player.

With all of this said, it's true that not every game has a visible set of goals, or any available success or failure metrics.  There are titles out there that deliberately subvert the very idea of success and failure states; this is where I would say the avant-garde of gaming truly lies.  From one point of view, The Stanley Parable has six failure states.  From another point of view, it has six success states.  What it actually has are six conclusions and ways to reach them, the ultimate meanings of which are left to the player.  None are particularly desirable (at least, of the ones I saw); nor is any one better or worse than the others.  An existential crisis in every box!

The Path is another art game that subverts the idea of success and failure states.  There are six player characters; each girl has a starting point and is told to go to an ending point via the given path.  The game, such as it is, happens in the experiences along the way; the journey is the destination and the destination is incidental.  Grandmother's house is more of a concept than a crucial place to be.

One of six sisters finding maturity, sexuality, and experiential horror between home and Grandmother's.

The avant-garde exists deliberately to undermine the tropes and tools of our media.  That's what it's for, and I have long thought gaming would truly come into its own as an art form when a thriving independent and avant-garde scene could generate new ideas that would, in time, filter into mainstream development.  Film history and the histories of other arts have evolved along this path, and evolving technology and the ubiquity of distribution venues (i.e. the internet) have now made the production and release of art games common.

Aside from deliberately subversive arguable non-game experiences like The Stanley Parable (see Line Hollis for links to and reviews of more obscure art games than you can imagine), I don't think I've ever played any interactive digital experience in the "game" category that didn't have either some kind of failure or some kind of success built in.  Even the visual poem Flower partakes: you can't really fail (I was dreadful at using the motion controls, but as I recall you just keep trying, except perhaps for the stormy level), but as with a classic adventure game, you do need actively to succeed to continue.

If a game had absolutely no success metrics or failure states in any form, whether intentional or untentional, direct or subverted, dictated or player-driven, would it still be a game?  Maybe, in the same way Andy Warhol's Empire is still a film.

So, after all of this, we come back around to Dennis and to Michael.  As much as I think Dennis is wrong to assert that these digital experiences we all enjoy aren't "games," he's also right.  That is: we have to use the existing vocabulary for the time being, even if only to transition away from it as our discussion evolves.  We've only got so many words right now, and we -- players, critics, and designers -- need to be on the same plane to communicate.

But is "video game" really the right term for the transcendent, new immersive-media experience Michael seems to covet?  As long as those experiences have discrete goals, and as long as player input determines the failure or success of those goals, I think we can use the words we have.  We have a while yet to revisit our lexicon; I hope we've decided what to call the experience before we get to the point where the Holodeck actually shoots back.

Hardcore Scrabble

I tend toward perfectionism, I admit, and toward completionism.  These are (especially together) nearly as often failings as they are virtues.  Still, we all have our own issues and despite my drive toward achievement I tend to shy away from competitive games; I don't like to get into contests that I have no chance of winning.

It's not that I need to win all the time; rather, it's an awareness of my weaknesses.  I'm an overweight asthmatic with a bad knee; I wouldn't enter footrace unless I planned for some reason to place last.  I do enter trivia contests, because at least there I have a chance to rise or fall on my own merits.

This means there's a genre of gaming I tend not to tackle.  I stick to single-player games, whether narrative or competitive, or occasionally to cooperative multiplayer games.  I don't want to put myself in an us-vs-them situation either on my own merits or as the weakest link of a team.  Competition is, of course, easiest with the gaming partner who lives with you, but I'm particularly adverse to competing against my spouse.  It's a level of marital discord that I simply don't need.

But speaking of my spouse, thanks to deals on sites like Groupon and LivingSocial, we manage to get away once or twice a year on little, inexpensive-but-lovely B&B trips in the region.  (There are rather a lot of picturesque country getaways within a 3-hour drive of Washington, DC.)  We take these trips as a time to unplug, but sometimes find ourselves with some quiet afternoon or evening time to fill.

As it turns out, nearly every B&B on Earth seems to have a Scrabble set somewhere.

Not a euphemism: we play Scrabble on vacation.

 Here's the thing I like about playing Scrabble with my husband: we're both terrible at it.

I'm great at thinking of words, but without the right tiles in hand or the right spaces on the board on which to put them, it doesn't matter.  Meanwhile, his strategic sense is better than mine, but I have an unerring ability to steal exactly the letter he was going to build from on his next turn.

We're both awful.  And we're matched 2-2-1 over the last year's worth of trips, from Labor Day weekend 2010 to Labor Day weekend 2011.  And we both stay awful, and thus the games, while competitive, remain fun and not hostile.

Here's the thing about gaming: we really are all designed to overlearn the system.  It's just how games and players work: we look at a system and then we dismantle and master it.  And it's something each of us does methodically (though methods vary), up until the point where the pleasure wears off.

That "splort" is so damn satisfying.

When the pleasure wears off, some of us quit.  I don't tend to play Fruit Ninja much on my phone anymore, because I reached a mastery plateau: incremental increases in high score take far too much play time, and suck the fun out of the attempt, making it instead a grim, pulp-covered death march to the next "correct" move.  Others double down and find a new pleasure, in the competition itself.  When you've mastered the game, you no longer derive joy from your own high scores -- pssh, of course you're awesome! -- but from knowing your score beats others.

When the going gets tough, some of us go for a walk outside and some of us plan to become national champion.  It takes all sorts.

When we talk about "casual" gamers vs "core gamers," I don't actually think we mean the type of game each camp enjoys.  There are Boggle and Scrabble players who will absolutely school you, and who make it their mission to do so.  Somewhere out there, there's someone who's gotten a 100% and an Ace on every level of Peggle and Peggle Nights.  In EQ2, there are folks out there who are so hardcore into the crafting system (and just the crafting system) that they know more about it than the dev team does.  And no matter who you are, someone out there is way more into (and better at) Wii Tennis than you.  Meanwhile, there are folks who play Call of Duty once or twice a month for fun, gamers who pop into World of Warcraft occasionally just to chat with buddies, and players who don't care about their KTD ratio in Halo or Counter-Strike.

When we collectively talk about gamers and gaming, though, we tend to separate the "casual" and "core" gamers by their preferred genre.  There's a definite dismissive attitude ingrained in the culture: "Mom's not a real gamer, she just plays Facebook games."  And yet, what if she plays them consistantly, constantly, to a point of true mastery?  And of course, even a competitive PvP game isn't really good sport if girls are winning.

From my point of view, I think one of the biggest challenges we have in talking about gaming and gamer populations comes from our whole really being made of two halves.  This is where the constant (and somewhat exhasting) ludonarrative debate comes from, among critics and writers.  In short: when we talk about games, are we talking about their rules and forms of mastery, or about the stories they tell?  Both, or neither?

Seriously, more time on animation than on fighting.

On the one hand, we have a physical challenge, one that can be mastered and set aside.  But in our biggest games, the skill or reflex mastery comes paired with a narrative that has to run its course regardless of the player's level of accomplishment.  For the first half of Divinity II, the fights are too challenging; for the last third, they're far too easy.  When starting a Japanese-style party-based RPG like Chrono Cross, fights begin as an elaborate process that you can have difficulty learning -- but then, aside from bosses, descend into farce, taking up your time with repetitive intro and outro animations and fanfares.

A film director can and does control the pacing and delivery of the entirety of his product.  A game designer has more trouble with the pacing.  If a game is strictly, 100% linear with no deviations, it's a niche product: an interactive novel, or the game-film.  The tautness, delivery, and coherence of Heavy Rain varies depending how you play it.  One way it's a thriller; another way, it's slightly disconnected; a third way, it's a drama.  In the end, though, there are a total of four characters and 12 endings, and so David Cage and Quantic Dream are able to shape it to their whims.

There's only one way to play Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, and only one way to play Uncharted.  But there are a dozen ways to play Mass Effect.  Can BioWare forsee that I'm going to go search every planet and complete every side quest in the galaxy?  Can they predict which one I will finally skip?

For me, of course, the answer is back up there in the first sentence: I tend toward completionism, and will perform, and try to master, every skill a game sets before me.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have to start a New Game Plus in Bastion.  It has these proving grounds, you see...

Halp! Brain abducted by pegs.

When I was busy self-righteously telling Ubisoft to stop alienating woman gamers, I tossed off the line, "It's not all Peggle out our way."  Indeed, at the time I wrote it, it was never all Peggle out my way -- I'd never actually played the game, but landed on it as a quick one-word, recognizable casual title that would allow the sentence to flow.

But shortly after that post, the Amazon AppStore had Peggle free for Android for 24 hours.  Nataurally, I simply had to download it to my phone.  A couple of weeks after that, Peggle Nights was something like $4 on Steam.  I'm a big fan of putting my money where my mouth is when it comes to supporting any creative industry, and I thought I owed PopCap a few bucks for how much I'd been playing their mobile ports.  And, well -- better not to ask how many hours I might have spent flinging virtual balls at orange pegs, over the last two months.  It's not a number I'm willing to admit in public.

I really, really hate this level. Flames... on the side of my face...

Why do I do it?  Why does the rat in Psych 101 keep pushing the lever in his cage?

At first, it was straight-up fun.  PopCap knows what they're doing, and playing gave me juuuuuuuuust enough reward and satisfaction in return for an incremental increase in difficulty.  The gentle learning curve and consistently encouraging tone made the game experience pleasurable in a very basic sort of way: I was solving simple problems and, as a reward, getting points, congratulations, and slightly more difficult problems.

Eventually, though, the pleasure started to wear thin.  Instead wearing a thoughtful expression punctuated by the occasional grin of triumph, I became a picture of grim determination.  The adventure mode in both games had to be completable, after all; Peggle is not designed for the hardcore crowd (however loosely we define that term) and if players significantly older, significantly younger, and generally less dextrous than I were the target audience (as they are), surely I, too, could find a way through the hell levels.

Eventually I did.  And yet I still became unable to stop playing entirely.  Because there are challenges to complete, trophies to earn, and records to break.  The Ace scores can't all be impossible, right?  And having earned 100% completion on two or three levels, surely I can manage it on at least half of the remainder...

I've come quite close to 100% on this level more than once, but I use Renfield.

The truth about myself that PopCap have laid bare before me is both a lovely and an ugly one: if you give me a challenge, I will assume it can be beaten and I will keep going until that challenge lies defeated at my feet.

On the one hand, this is an invaluable attribute in my career, or in the learning of new skills.  I assume that I can update my web-design knowledge to include HTML5, and so it will be done.  I assumed I could find some measure of success as a blogger and as a writer, and lo, each month I meet some new milestone I didn't know awaited me -- and I continue to enjoy doing so!  But on the other hand... sometimes you really do need to know when to fold 'em.  There were classes in college I failed rather than withdrew from; relationships I watched wither (or explode) rather than pull out of.

A game doesn't need hundreds of hours of my life, even the casual hours waiting for a train or waiting for my turn in the bathroom, just because it presents a challenge.  Challenges will always outnumber me.  But making US government work, ending world hunger, and getting international relations sorted are challenges that will always lie well beyond my scope.  So I keep filling my attention with challenges I can actually resolve.

1 million point challenge -- I am coming for you.  After that, though, I think I'll take on the challenge of exploring other pastures. 

(And of writing a more difficult piece I'm avoiding by meditating on Peggle.)

Are games fun?

A couple of months back, Your Critic and another blogger started an e-mail exchange on the subject of "fun" as a measure of success in gaming.  He began: 

"Some people are uncomfortable with "fun" being reason for a hobby and maybe it doesn't need to be a primary driver (I don't think knitters or woodworkers talk about "fun" as much as they talk about fulfillment, creating stuff with their hands, camaraderie, etc but i could be wrong). Ignoring "fun" though, in my opinion that's how we end up with shit like Heavy Rain or The Passage or whatever - games that place "meaning" above "giving people an actual reason to play this" (aka fun). It seems like the people who defend "fun" either end up as trolls or as pure designers talking about practical problems or both, like danc's essay on criticism."

He then moved on to Child of Eden, which a number of folks had been ardently discussing on Twitter.  [I won't be able to play it until the PS3 version is available, so although I appreciate the suggestion, folks, it won't be up on deck here any time soon.]

[I]t's also a legitimately great narrative. Not through the text which is sparse and heavy handed ... but through the actual game mechanics. And I think at some point we get so trapped up in fun / not fun and story / not story that we forget that text is not the only way of telling a story -- level design, enemy design, the basic mechanics are all ways of telling a story and as a bonus they are "game-y" aka not incompatible with "fun". They can set a mood that is both weirdly serious ... without being overly tedious ... unlike other "arthouse" games where the tedium and repetition are "the point" (i am guilty of this!!!) . You can't just go on youtube and watch the cutscenes to get the narrative part of it (like I should have done with Enslaved), you actually have to participate in it to understand it. 

Zach's argument resonated with me for a few reasons.  For one thing, at the time, I was in the middle of Enslaved and he's right about its total failure to use game mechanics in any meaningful way.

He raised a really valid point: those of us who spend a lot of time discussing the various artistic and narrative merits and failures of games often try to avoid "fun" as a measure of success.  For one thing, it's so subjective as to be meaningless: plenty of people seem to think that Mortal Kombat or Gran Turismo or flight sims are fun, and I personally would rather watch paint dry.  And then there's that other, more dangerous angle: the new and growing mainstream understanding of gaming as something not just for boys under 17 is really hard won, and none of us want to encourage a backslide.

So I thought about his e-mail for a little bit, and came to this conclusion:

"I think you're right that "fun" is the wrong metric for discussion -- although it's probably a really good metric for, "Is this worth sixty of my dollars?"  I'd actually remove "fun" and replace it with "pleasurability."  Pleasure comes in many different forms, and sometimes mixed with pain, as it were.  Thus, pleasure to be found in sad or tragic stories, or even in terror (horror films, roller coasters, whatever).  Pleasure comes in conquering a system (something knitters do just as much as gamers) or in solving a problem (gardening, knitting, gaming, woodworking, pretty much everything).  ...  Where do we derive the pleasure from gaming?  Is it from seeing a pre-defined narrative unfold?  Is it from participating in the unfolding of that narrative?  Is it from conflict?  I think the answer to all is "yes" and also "no" and also that there are a hundred more reasons."

Our discussion continued, and meanwhile the wheels in my head kept turning.  I am only one gamer, only one set of preferences.  There are loads of genres and games out there that don't appeal to me in the slightest and yet developers who produce those titles make millions upon millions of dollars annually.  So why do people play them?

So I decided I'd ask people who play games.  All told, across the blog comments, tweets, comments elsewhere, and e-mails, I got about 45 responses.  For the record, I love every single response and I had a phenomenal time reading them, so thank you a hundred times over to everyone who gave me an answer.

First -- there is a sad note running through the comments I saw: an enormous amount of self-doubt and insecurity.  A half-dozen responses explicitly fell along the lines of, "Well, I don't think I count because...," or, "I'm not good enough so..."  To each and every one of you, I lovingly say: bullshit.  Don't let the hardcore loudmouths drive you away from a thing you enjoy.

"Why do you game?" is a more complicated question than it appears at first, and many respondents ran into that wall of complications where they weren't expecting to find it.  Even so, though, the answers very clearly fell into a few distinct categories. The answers broke down into two philosophical areas of thought: "Here's what I like," and, "Here's why I think I do it."  I went all quasi-scientific on this information (my day job has "analyst" in the title, I'm that kind of person), sorting the answers into some rough buckets and tallying the responses.  Nearly everyone had more than one major reason for playing games, but only a small handful of folks gave more than three or four.

A full 50% of answers fell into the category I rounded up and called "Goals / Accomplishment / Success."  I decided that the urges to solve problems, accomplish goals, complete quests or missions, or to understand systems were all similar enough to group together.  My own professed desire to feel "clever" while gaming would fall into this bucket, as well as answers like:

• "The nice thing about puzzle games is that there is an answer, and if you work hard enough, you will find it.  Wish the same could be said of the real world..."  (roleplayinggirl)
• "This is possibly why I mostly focus on rpgs & mmo type games.  Generally, unless the game is terrible, I get up from a session feeling like I "accomplished" something, even if that something is as mundane as gaining a level or just moving through a story arc."  (Andy)
• "For some games, it's the feeling that I pulled off something complex, like combos or special moves in fighting games. When I was a wee lad, the shoryuken was a really tricky maneuver, and I still feel a bit smug when I can hit a jumping opponent with it."  (Matt Smyczynski)

A common thread across these answers was the desire to complete actions or solve problems that aren't available in the real world.  Day jobs and kids are far messier than any quest journal, and real problems tend not to be easily solved or to come with a guaranteed reward at the end.  One of the best summaries of the real-world impossibility problem came from this commenter:

I game because life is too short.

I want to be a surgeon, I want to be a plucky lawyer, I want to be a goddamn Space Marine. I want to fly a spaceship and manage an empire and escape from the ruins of an insane corporation and fight the forces of evil. I contain multitudes, as the saying goes, and not all of them are always satisfied with being a sysadmin (which is just a game anyway).

I can't do all those things because, besides the fact that some of them are impossible, there isn't enough time. To be good at something, to really accomplish things in the real world, you have to commit yourself, focus, and iterate. That's its own joy but it takes exclusivity. You can't commit to everything, so I do a few things for real and I want to do more for pretend.  (timothyalvin)

Following from real-world impossibilities and the desire for problems with actual solutions, a full third (34%) of the answers also specifically called out gaming for escapism, for relaxation, or as a coping technique.  A set of tangible goals, placed in a world (narrative or otherwise) with specific parameters and unbreakable rules does indeed have appeal as a method of dealing with the chaos of life.  Another solid third (32%) mentioned that gaming help them stay in touch with friends and family, and form the basis of a true social connection:

• "It allows me to cope. I have depression and some unfortunate living situations and gaming has helped me stay afloat. Though it's also a bit of an outlet, since I get really, really into the games and let off some steam."  (ashpanic)
• "I also like the social aspect of games (even though I'm an introvert!).   I like doing stuff in a team, and enhancing the team."  (Doctor Jay)
• "I enjoy the social interaction of playing a game you love with other people who also love it, whether it's online or right there in your living room. I do prefer the teamwork aspect (us versus the game) than direct competition (us versus each other), but both are enjoyable. My stepdaughter has lately been chopping me into tiny pieces when we duel with our lightsabers in The Force Unleashed. Rather than being upset by the shame of being pwned by a 13 year-old girl, I couldn't be more proud."  (Doug)
• "Escapeism during a workday which I play lots of mobile games, plus most of them are fun. Another reason; games are using your brain to think a lot which I like the challenge i.e. Portal, Uncharted. And games are great socializing with people off or online i.e. build friendships. without games my lifestyle would have been different not for the better."  (Joe)

Narrative gaming, though, is clearly where it's at.  Over 40% of the answers cited stories and storytelling, and of those a high number specifically referenced what makes games different from other media.

I've always liked storytelling, and interacting with characters. My dream since I was little is that I can change the world and I matter, and games can fulfill that feeling for me. Because of the immersive nature of games, I think that they can easily rouse feelings, though I especially like it through the narrative. You care about the story and characters more because you are a part of it,  instead of merely observing; the game can't go on without you.  (Galatea)


I like stories, especially grand epics, and I think video games are the perfect medium for telling them because they're interactive rather than passive and fluid rather than static like movies or novels. In some games (Fallout, any BioWare game) I have a role in crafting the characters so I care more about them. In others (Left 4 Dead 2, Arkham Asylum) I have a role in keeping them alive. To my taste, games largely replace the need for adventure/fantasy/action/sci-fi movies and novels.  (RedJenny)

I promised I'd give my own set of answers after I got to hear from everyone else, so here it is:

I like to feel clever.  I truly enjoy solving problems, unraveling mysteries, and feeling like I accomplished something.  So finding a way out of a sticky situation gives me a rush, as does wrapping my head around a complex problem, as in Portal.

I like feeling like a badass.  It's not that I think for a second that I could do what Commander Shepard does; I'm a writer and a gamer and Shepard's physical ability puts most marathoners to shame.  But I love being in her skin for a while.  It's role-playing for a reason; I enjoy peeking into other stories and souls for a while to see what makes those characters tick.  Drama's where it's at, and although I try to keep it out of my own life, I like living vicariously through fictional people.

And last but not least, I'm a sucker for exploration.  Give me a map and I will uncover every nook and cranny it has to offer.  I will climb the mountains around the Capital Wasteland to see where the invisible walls kick in; I will go right to the perimeter of every castle and prowl the walls looking for loose stones; I will explore every wall in every corridor of every mine and dungeon just to be sure I didn't miss something interesting in that last square inch.  (Back when I started playing EQII, the first thing I did with my level 11 Predator was sneak around the entire perimeter of the Commonlands, and take the griffons over the middle.  I died many times, exploring that way, but when the rez points were in a location I hadn't explored yet I considered it a fortuitous shortcut.)

So where does all this leave us with "fun?"  It turns out (to me, unsurprisingly) that players are smart enough to break that one down for themselves.  A scant three (3) people used that word, and the ones who did qualified it.  Enstarstarstar sums it up just the way I would:

because i can, and because it's fun.

or, put slightly longer: i game sometimes to relax, sometimes to be thrilled, sometimes to laugh, sometimes to escape, sometimes to challenge myself, sometimes to compete, sometimes to socialize, sometimes to immerse myself in a story, sometimes to fit myself into a world, sometimes to kill time, sometimes to kill, sometimes to think, sometimes to fly, and sometimes to be a jedi.

it all depends on when, where, why, and with whom.

So say we all.

Input Needed!

I'm going to have some extra writing time next week, I hope (horde of cousins-in-law at the beach houses permitting), and I hope to be tackling an idea I've wanted to delve into for rather a while.

But before I can write it, I need as much input as possible from as many readers as possible.  So please: retweet this one.  Share the link with your buddies.  Ask around and see if you can get anyone else to answer.  Twenty responses are great; a hundred are even better.  And there are no wrong answers.

I want to hear from everyone, from the 40-hour-per-week WoW raider to the sudoku-on-my-commute iPhone owner to the once-a-week tabletop gamer.  There are no wrong respondents.

So here's what I want to know from you, fantastic readers:

Why do you game?

Each of us has a different reason for being into games, and each of us has different game types.  Do you like competition?  Solving puzzles?  Escapism, but more interactive than TV?

When you're playing, what really gets you going?  Is it the thrill of the chase?  The satisfaction of thinking something through?  Overcoming a challenge?  Sharpshooting?  Putting yourself into another role?  Getting to experience a story?

I don't want to influence any of the answers, and I need to leave myself an intro for my post, so I'm not going to give my full answer right now. ;)  But by way of example, I will give one of my reasons: I like feeling clever.  I like it when a game lets me solve a puzzle of any kind, be it Peggle or Portal or Phoenix Wright.  I like a chance to flex my brain and to come to my own conclusions.  So that's one of the reasons why I game.  (There are more.)

What are yours?  Let's hear them!  I want to get a really broad array of opinions.  And if you'd like to answer the question but for some reason feel uncomfortable leaving a comment, feel free to drop me a line at any of the contact options over on the right. 

The Chatty RPG

We live in the future now, really.

We have iPods and iPhones and Droids and Blackberries and laptops and netbooks and iPads and eight thousand other ways of keeping in touch with everything.

But we don't walk up to others and talk to strangers on the street.  At least, in big cities you sure don't.  You might exchange a polite word ("How about that rain?"  "Sad about the Caps, huh?") in the elevator, or say, "Excuse me," or "I like those shoes," to someone on the Metro, but that's about it.  There are so many of us in such a small space that when you're on the T, the MTA, or the Metro -- you just politely keep to yourself.  You don't ask a stranger for his entire life story, then walk into his house uninvited and start talking to his wife.

(We also keep our hands off other people's stuff.  My neighbors don't have stacks of barrels sitting outside their front doors, but if they did, I wouldn't go rooting through them to look for books, vials, food, or coin.  That would be rude, and criminal to boot.)

But then there is the world of gaming.  Or rather, there are the worlds of gaming.  When you reach a new location in an RPG, what's the very first thing you do?  (After saving, of course.)  You talk to every. single. person. in town.  At great length.  You ask them their life stories.  You perform their tasks and errands, up to and including murder.  You ask anyone and everyone you meet if they need help, and if they do, you immediately proffer it.  Your sword (or gun -- Fallout and Mass Effect are not innocent of this) is at anyone and everyone's disposal, with small exceptions for not helping members of a problematic alignment, or persons perceived as evil or shady.

In the same way that so many RPGs hearken back to a medieval world that never existed, I think they also hearken back to a small town / village perspective that never existed.  They are all small-town Britain (or occasionally France), where everyone is happy to see you, will share his woes, and will ask a favor of you.  You, the Mary Sue Gamer, are going to save the world one lost kitten at a time, and locals expect and allow this sort of behavior from you.  In some games (again the newer installments of the Fallout series leap to mind) the locals at least distrust you until you do some small tasks to prove your good intent.  And there is more and more of that.

But part of me can't help but feel that the longing for a never-extant perfectly pastoral world keeps expressing itself in our game worlds.  This isn't just one game and it's not just one designer; the theme repeats itself over and over in European, Japanese, and American RPGs. 

They pretty much all look like this. (This one's Oblivion.)

If some weird dude with pointy armor and a bad-ass companion showed up in most actual small medieval hamlets?  The majority of townsfolk would hunker down and avoid coming to his attention until he went the hell away.  The coming of warriors meant the coming of war, and untold number of fields were ruined and everyday folk killed in the battles, wars, and skirmishes that popped up all over medieval Europe.  Armed conflict was an unpleasant and commonplace way to go.

I mean, really: you're a pig farmer, a peasant who lives in a thatch hut with a hole in its roof for smoke to get out.  Your immediate village has about 50 people in it, and for market days, when you go, you head (on foot) 10 miles down the road to the big town.  Life's all right, if dirty and smelly.  You think you have almost enough food stored for winter and you've figured out who to marry in the spring, and then these people show up:

A collection of PCs and NPCs from some modern RPGs.

I don't know about most of you but I personally would go hide behind the hut, with the pigs, and hope the creepy men and women with the ridiculous and expensive armor and visible, obvious, heavily-used weaponry would just mosey on by and leave me alone.

Although I've only lived in large, East-coast cities for the last 30 years, the rest of the modern world is not so different.  I've just been out in the countryside for the past three days, hanging out at a bed & breakfast with a vineyard, a wild garden, and some friendly critters.  (The cats decided my husband was their particular friend; the ducks mainly just quacked in a panicky sort of way.  And the peacock decided that the humans needed to be awake at dawn.)  We were 150 miles out of the city and about 50 years back in time, out in the woods with the wines.  And when we went into the small, local town, we shared some polite words and conversations with the various folks we met, but I didn't ask our waiter if he needed help avenging his brother, or check with the bartender to see who owed her an outstanding tab.  Nor would I have done so in 1911, 1611, or 1311.

We all know that games are emphatically not reality.  If they were, we wouldn't play them, gamification aside.  And there's a definite line where we do and don't want "realism" in our gaming.  It's one thing if our heroes need food, water, and sleep.  Sometimes we'll even put up with lingering injury from wounds, or NPCs going to bed at night.  But anything more realistic than that and we start to get grumpy.  And I'm not asking for greater medieval realism in my games, either.  I don't have the energy to play that, for starters.  Nor do I want my gaming to be as depressing as that reality was.

Gamers are stereotypically and infamously asocial introverts.  (As always, the truth is something less than the image.)  And yet, where our game worlds could give us missions in a hundred different ways, the most common means is through dialogue and lots of it.  Is that what, collectively, we really crave?  A conversation?

No real research here, or anything, and I'm not sure I expect answers.  I'm just wondering why the patterns in our games are the patterns in our games.