Why Do You Play Games?

 

There are times that I browse the internet and realize that some of the things that people are writing about games are so insightful and so relevant that I wonder why I even bother.  Both Tycho and Gabe’s posts on why they play games, and the discussion about how we all differ in what we look to get out of them was of an ever higher standard than their usual fare.  Tycho said this:

People play games (videogames included) for a number of reasons, and those motivations make different types of games more appealing than others. We’re not measuring laser-cut slabs of aluminum here, with precise angles and volumes. We’re talking about a context in which the weight of each element depends on the person viewing it. I will often read a review of a game I have played and cry aloud at its content, as though they were making false claims about demonstrable, physical phenomena. It’s like I am gesturing with my whole body at what is obviously a pumpkin, and being told that the object on the table is, in fact, an opossum. They aren’t liars, or villains. They are gamers. They simply have a different sort of metabolism, one that craves peculiar, to my mind heretical fare.

A good example of this playing out is in the guitars for Guitar Hero and Rock Band. When the Rock Band guitar is working, I vastly prefer it: its size and shape are much closer to electric guitars I have played, and the strum bar is thick at the outer edge to be gripped like a pick. Its operation is largely silent, without the characteristic clickof a microswitch, designed (I am sure) explicitly to be quiet. Some people love that click, though – it means precision – and for the player who craves that fifth star, there is no higher virtue. Stars in single player are, for me, irrelevant. I’m sure this makes me a scoundrel. I only care about stars in co-operative multiplayer, where I see them as an index of our indomitable band spirit. I want a measurement of our unity. I’m playing the same game for an entirely different purpose. I wouldn’t notice if it did click. When the song begins, I enter a trance.

That’s a pretty serious distinction – people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy – and its only one axis of the diagram.

To which Gabe added:

Tycho talked about the different reasons people play games in his post and I thought it was pretty interesting. It’s a conversation we’ve had before and I think it’s something a lot of gamers probably don’t think about. I remember it came up while we were both playing Metroid Prime: Corruption. I was talking to him about how I was getting frustrated because some of the boss battles were really giving me a hard time. I realised I don’t play games for the challenge. I don’t need or want to be punished by a game for making mistakes. I play games for what Ron Gilbert calls “new art”. I play to see the next level or cool animation. I don’t play games to beat them I play games to see them. Coming to that realisation was actually sort of important for me.

It got me thinking about why we play games (obviously), and also why we make some of the choices we do in the games we play.  N’gai Croal had a couple of posts recently about how games can do better at making us feel emotions as well as making us feel the weight of our choices more acutely.  He mentions Bioshock, Mass Effect and Shadow of the Colossus, all games that really affected me as I played through them.  There is a large range of emotion, from exultant to amused, to grieved, that each of those games takes you through if you’re willing to let them.

N’gai went one step further though and proposed an optional system where your in game actions would have repercussions in the larger community of gamers, ala Facebook.

But what if developers attempted to bring social sanction into the experience? What if your Gamertag were designated “Child Killer” for having murdered the Little Sisters–or “Good Samaritan” for having saved them? Microsoft recently announced its plans to add the Facebook and MySpace-inspired feature of allowing you to browse your friends’ Friends Lists; what if everyone on your Friends List were notified each time you killed a Little Sister–or every time you rescued one–like the Status Updates on Facebook?

What if the game maintained a list of everyone you killed in the game, including their names, ages, pre-Adam pictures and a description of how you killed them, for all of your friends to peruse at their leisure? If your peer group were “watching” you, if the Xbox Live community or the entire Internet could keep tabs on your videogame morality, would it change how you played games?

This concept has implications not only for the person playing the game, but also for everyone on that person’s Friends List. If one of your friends were harvesting Little Sisters, would you rebuke them? Attempt to persuade them to stop? Or would you stay silent, and in doing so, would your silence make you virtually complicit in their digital amorality?

If we extend this thought experiment to other games that give players a wider range of choice, like Grand Theft Auto or Mass Effect, how would you respond if you were notified that one or more of your friends were jacking cars, beating up hookers or killing cops? Perhaps a virtual Temperance Union might emerge in Liberty City (or a Krogan Defense Forcein the case of Mass Effect), with a small number of gamers encouraging and/or shaming the larger GTA IV player base to refrain from immoral behavior within the game. If that happened, what would you say if one of your friends adopted that philosophy and was playing GTA IV in as law-abiding a manner as possible? Would you encourage them—or taunt them?

The meaningfulness of such a system depends on how each of us views games: as a Rorschach blot which reveals something about who we are deep down inside; as a laboratory in which we can safely experiment with behavior in which we’d never engage in the real world; or as a disposable form of entertainment with no greater implications whatsoever. The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and as fans of virtual experimentation, we’re generally not in favor of systems that would inhibit players’ testing of virtual boundaries. But our proposal would be voluntary, an optional choice for those gamers who want to give developers more ways to make them feel bad. And while developers have more work to do on their own side of the ledger, having access to tools like these that would let them enlist us gamers as part of their process of emotional engineering might not be a bad idea at all.

It’s an interesting concept, but it’s still hard to effectively shift your behavior, even if your friends could see it.  After all, I hardly think that anyone would be shocked if they saw you committing crimes during a GTA session.  If you’ve bought the game, I assume that you’re ready and willing to be morally ambivalent in the virtual space.  I’d be more likely to chide you though (if perhaps only jokingly) if I knew you were a little sister harvester. 

On a larger scale though, I love the descriptions that these writers are giving us about why we play games–both Tycho and Gabe’s games as personal accomplishment vs. emotional/social experience, and N’Gai’s Blot/Lab/Entertainment model in the above paragraph. 

I think that I fall more on the social experience side of what Gabe and Tycho are talking about.  I’m a decant gamer, but I’m all too aware that I’m not the most excellent shredder of guitar hero licks, or the most 1377 at Halo 3, and I have no interest in putting in the eight hours a day practice that would be required to get there.  I’m drawn more to games that let me interact with an emotional experience–Final Fantasy, Mass Effect, Bioshock, Shadow of the Collosus. 

On the other hand, there is just a tiny bit of completionist in me.  I love the side quest, the extra meandering that finds you that little bit of story.  I also feel all three of N’Gai’s options:  I play games to relax, I use them as a conduit for self revelation, and also to safely project myself into otherwise dangerous or adventurous experiences or behaviors.  It’s a little of each. 

So how about you?  Why do you play games, and what are some of the driving factors behind the choices you make (when you’re given choices)?  What about N’Gai’s proposal of social sanctions for immoral gameplay on Xbox Live as an optional feature you could turn on in your friend group?  Good idea? Bad idea?  Read those articles (they’re worth it, trust me) and then weigh in.

–WG