by George Carr

When I recently joined Facebook, I was surprised to discover that several of my friends are well-established Mafia dons online; when my email address books started cross-pollinating in social outlets like LinkedIn, I was surprised to find several of my gaming buddies holding down serious day jobs.[1] But on reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised; after all, the desktop computer blurs the lines between our work and game environments, if they were ever really clear.  If you have logged the uncountably massive hours in front of a computer screen that are by now common for U.S. office workers, the notion of spending even more hours on that same computer, for entertainment purposes, has to feel a little weird.  This is probably a big reason why dedicated game consoles, like Playstation and Wii, are popular: even when the home computer isn’t being used for more mundane shopping and research tasks, it’s hard to imagine sitting in front of that screen yet again, with its ergonomic mousepad and office-like trappings (a desktop! on the screen!), in order to have “fun.”

And yet millions of Americans do just that: collectively, we spent $538 million on PC-based games in 2009 alone.  And while that’s only a tiny slice of the relevant sales pie – Americans spent almost $10 billion on console games in the same year – it’s still a big number.  Even though PC game players spend some of that money on games originally written for consoles, the big draw of PC gaming is its complex interface; while consoles’ handheld controllers have fewer than fifteen buttons, PCs have extended keyboards.  This means not just a complete set of alphanumeric keys, but also extra function keys, separate number pads, and – of special interest to gamers – dedicated macro-sequence keys.  These single buttons rattle off long strings of keystrokes; while office workers might use them to store oft-used word-processing phrases, like signature lines and letterhead customizations, gamers use them for devastating combo attacks and long game-chat speeches.  Setting up these macros is fairly complicated, requiring at least the kind of computer savvy that allows people to manually turn off the annoying paper-clip figure in Word, or work out a multi-argument Google search.

Which is another way of saying that the kind of people who play games on their home computers tend to be the kind of people who probably already have computer-savvy jobs, as knowledge workers; the very people who spend vast swaths of time on their office computers, all the while emailing and blogging: the modern chattering classes.  And sure enough, playing PC games involves plenty of chatter: Civilization includes a council of advisors that repeatedly opine on the player’s choices; The Sims gives lots of screen space to chat bubbles over character’s heads; World of Warcraft defaults to five real-time text-chat channels.  These are game environments for people who read very quickly, and whose idea of “fun” includes multitasking, endless customization, and complex interaction with multiple characters and plotlines.  After a session of computer gaming, I feel relaxed, but it’s a different feeling than from watching the sun set with a glass of wine, or emerging from the world of a compelling film.  It’s more like the feeling of a job well done, a sort of accomplished relaxation.

For whom is this funhouse fun?  Apparently, for people who like a challenge: PC games are notoriously hard, often so hard that they can’t be beaten, at least in the traditional sense of mastering the game’s central challenge and watching the game’s story come to a close.  Some games just keep making the same challenges faster and tougher until the player loses, while keeping actual victory over the game engine impossible;[2] the real competition is between players, who rank themselves based on high score, or how long they stayed alive.  Other games try to downplay the possibility of victory; for instance, The Sims self-identifies as a “software toy” rather than a game, to discourage its buyers from disappointment when they discover that there are no criteria for winning.  The prevailing philosophy, though, seems to be making games so complex, deep, and multifaceted that any single player will end up playing only a tiny subset of the available game.  World of Warcraft, for example, tracks over a thousand “achievements” for each player character, and finishing the game in a traditional sense – completing the quests offered and progressing through the game world’s valleys and towns in more or less linear fashion, eventually reaching the maximum character level – will only award a few dozen; the rest require completing more complex tasks, often requiring the cooperation of other players.

Even modern episodic television,[3] with its long story arcs, multiple plots and ensemble casts, isn’t as complicated as these big games.  What’s the attraction, then, that justifies such a steep learning curve?  It’s the unprecedented ability to suspend disbelief in the concept of really being the protagonist of an epic story.  As an audience, we can sympathize with the protagonist of a film or TV show, but her actions are dictated by the script, and when her choices deviate from our own, the “I am she” relationship is, shall we say, strained.[4] Reading fiction is a deeper mind-meld with the author, but the reader cannot exercise any meaningful control over the book’s plot, and this again strains the reader’s sympathetic relationship with the protagonist.

But in computer games, the player directly controls the protagonist’s actions, and as the games have grown more complex and mature, so have the player’s available choices.  Games from the early days of computing, like 1980′s Zork and 1984′s King’s Quest, led players through a few dozen locations, at most; later games got progressively larger, based on feedback from players who wanted the games to last longer.  In 1987, Dungeon Master brought 3-D graphics to a dozen-level dungeon; Ultima Underworld, from 1992, boasted a much larger dungeon including dozens of quests; 1993′s Myst took advantage of then-new CD-ROM technology to let players explore over a hundred locations.  By 2001, when Grand Theft Auto 3 opened up a world of three linked islands containing hundreds of quests, vehicles, and characters, it was clear that the actual game was taking place outside the structured storyline of the world narrative; gaming columnists began debating a new genre definition, the “sandbox” game, where the player has freedom to roam and explore the game world without finishing, or even following, any storyline at all.

It’s no coincidence, by the way, that many of these increasingly complex games were themed around medieval dungeons and fantasy stories.  Face-to-face role-playing games had caught on as childrens’ party games in the 1970s, and by far the most popular were medieval adventures.  The rules of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were first published in 1977, and role-playing game parties were quite the vogue for kids in the bourgeois classes in the 1980s, like me.  Those games involved lots of dice-rolling and arithmetic, and when we all got home computers, it only made sense to use them to help with the number-crunching and statistic tracking.  Computerized versions of the party game, first published by the D&D authors in 1980 (and available in unlicensed versions throughout the 1980s) had a ready-made audience, and they came to supplant the face-to-face game as they relieved us of the burdens of organizing role-playing parties, like having eight or ten actual friends on tap for frequent games.  By 1990, the publisher of the real-life party game, TSR, derived most of its income from publishing novels based on its games, and it finally went bust in 1997.[5] As the computerized games developed technologically, with more and more realistic graphics to portray monsters (and player avatars that could be customized to conform to the player’s own self-image or fantasy thereof), they came to be a reliable vehicle for players’ own aspirations.

The medieval fantasy setting is also popular because it’s well known and comfortable to all of us; even back in the years before computers were completely ubiquitous, there were dozens of well-known swords-and-sorcery films, TV shows, and books circulating around the zeitgeist.  There’s also a cultural element at work for Americans that kept the second-place contender–science fiction–from pulling ahead in the race: because technology both fascinates and scares us, it doesn’t provide much of an escape from anything.  Setting a story in the future can’t submerge subconscious fears about one’s having inadvertently contributed to whatever apocalypse is featured in the game/book/movie; indeed, some sci-fi adventure films directly criticize their own audience for letting the disaster happen.[6] But setting a story in the past assists with the escapism; because the player/audience lives in a reasonably happy present day, and all that happened during the Dark Ages is lost to history, medieval adventures can be as epic and super-sized as the imagination will allow, and yet never affect the course of actual history, or make life miserable for any contemporary people.  For a post-war American culture that spent thousands of hours watching television shows written to lack any connection to real-world events – so as to facilitate syndicated out-of-sequence re-runs until the end of time – this sort of existence outside history requires no real mental gymnastics.

So if the swords-and-sorcery computer game finds its niche in its unique ability for escapism, why are the most popular ones so difficult to play?  Because the game’s difficulty actually assists in the immersive experience of the game.  Being able to type one’s conversation in the game’s chat channel is far more realistic than selecting from a menu of pre-written answers.[7] Even putting in-game chatter aside, a complex game interface permits a wider variety of player actions, hence a greater feeling of autonomy, and freedom from some pre-scripted set of actions.  And that’s what PC gamers want: freedom and autonomy.  American culture deeply needs, maybe will fail without, a frontier to settle, and now that U.S. manifest destiny is geographically exhausted, the next frontier is online.

But given freedom and autonomy in a fantasy world, what do PC gamers actually do with it?  As it turns out, not that much.[8] A sizeable segment of the gaming population is obsessed with progress and rankings, as if the game were a sport.[9] This crowd obsesses over achievements and tournaments, studies the playstyles of top-ranked players, and chatters at length on blogs and chatboards about improving one’s play.  To keep players like this from scaring off (or in some game worlds, killing off) the more casual players, many games discourage excessive play.  For instance, World of Warcraft avatars need to rest or they incur a fatigue penalty, and the game’s most rewarding endgame activities – the quests and encounters that obsessive players would be most likely to grind over and over – are gated behind timers, restricted to once per day or week.  But intense players play multiple avatars, which largely neutralizes the timers’ effect, and spend additional time on the activities that aren’t timed at all.[10] To me, this kind of gameplay looks a lot like work, which if that strikes you as ironic, I agree.

A second group of players, which is not entirely exclusive from the first, focuses on exploration and completion.  Every side mission must be complete, every alley must be tagged, each and every car must be in the garage.  While this gameplay style is less competitive in the  interpersonal sense, it still engages the player who likes to focus on details, and usually ends up just as demanding of a player’s time and attention as competing directly with other players.  When I realized I was buying guidebooks and making checklists for the massive computer games–100% completion of Grand Theft Auto 3 takes quite a bit of recordkeeping–the fun I was supposedly having started to lose its luster.

The third common playstyle focuses mostly on socializing and role-playing, which is only possible in online games that permit chatter.[11] Sometimes, the chatter helps players achieve a shared goal, like building a cathedral or killing a dragon that threatens the entire game world; more often, it’s simply gossip about life outside the game,[12] which is oddly ironic: it prevents immersion in the game environment.  So a large cohort of gamers aren’t just escaping into a fantasy environment; they’re trying to build and maintain friendships with other people who enjoy the same fantasy.

In fact, if you think about the motivations for any of the player categories I’ve described, it doesn’t sound like people are escaping reality much at all, when they’re gaming.  In the game world, they do what they already do elsewhere: lonely people socialize, organized people organize, curious people explore; it’s not so much escapism as just another arena to play out one’s own contradictory desires and tendencies.  I worry that I’m starting to sound like Gerhard Schtitt, the philosophical tennis coach in Infinite Jest: the other players are not the game, the court and rules are not the game.  The game is only a canvas for the self to paint on, and the self expresses its intrinsic qualities through the game.[13]

But people still do manage to escape through the game, or at least exercise sides of their personalities that don’t get much exposure during their usual daytime activities.  The meek accountant joins battle as a strapping warrior; the housewife plays a beefy sheriff cleaning up an Old West town; the college athlete deftly manages planetary resources to win a long-fought space battle.  This classic role-play behavior used to be common in online chatrooms but are much less common these days; not only are chatrooms culturally passe, especially for younger people, but the believability of a false online persona is falling victim to two converging trends: anti-anonymity laws aimed at sex predators and political activists,[14] and the burgeoning influence of a culture that is willing to forego personal privacy in exchange for the ability to track what friends are doing.  It was weird for me to discover that one of my high school classmates is now an online poker mogul, but I’ll admit it’s somewhat reassuring to get online at midnight and find him working the tables as reliably as ever.

And perhaps that’s the reason so many people play games on the same computers they use for work; for most of us, especially the knowledge workers who spend a lot of time online already, work isn’t just a set of tasks to complete in order to get a paycheck; it’s a community of people.  And no console machine can let us interact with each other, or the games we play, as complexly and thoroughly as the desktop computer.

George Carr is the co-instigator of Supposedly Fun Things… and a lawyer in Cleveland.

___________________________________________________________________________________

I’m a lawyer, but I assumed all of my late-night gaming buddies were college students or slackers.  Shame on me.[back]

Were there games like this before Tetris, the massively popular 1986 time-waster that has ended up being more significant than Pong?  There have certainly been plenty in the years since.[back]

Say, after Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, which more or less invented the modern multiple-plot drama and season-long story-arc format that currently prevails.[back]

There’s also a generational factor at work here: for those of us who grew up a whole generation after Newton Minow declared television a vast wasteland in 1961, and whose parents capped TV watching but left computers unregulated, television can feel way too passive to hold one’s interest.[back]

The company was sold for little more than the licensing value of its old intellectual property, which include some beloved and lucrative game worlds that generate revenue to this day.[back]

Think of Logan’s Run (1976) and Mad Max (1979), which preached environmentalism and conservation, or The Omega Man (1971) and Blade Runner (1982), where humanity suffered the consequences of its own capitalistic excesses.  And anyone who’s seen Alien (1979) feels guilty for cooperating with multinational capitalism.  In contrast, one of the big metaphysical attractions of Star Wars (1977) is its being set “a long time ago” despite its obviously futuristic technology; its audience cannot be complicit in the creation of the evil Empire.[back]

Plus, the game authors, who must pander to the concerns of their teenage players’ most conservative parents, could not possibly write a message menu that would satisfy players’ desires for insult and gloating.[back]

U.S. residents’ freedoms to travel and speak as they like are the envy of the world, and we don’t tend to do much with them, either.  But I suppose true freedom includes the right to squander one’s gifts.[back]

Here I’m using the fairly common discrimination that sports are competitive while games are not.  Because this would make chess a sport but ballet a game, I’ll grant that the dichotomy has limits.  But it’s useful nonetheless.[back]

Plus, who plays only one game at a time?[back]

Oddly, most of the Facebook games are not social at all, because they don’t permit much in the way of contemporaneous messaging.  But because Facebook doesn’t use avatars, there’s some interesting implied communication happening, at least: when I fell into the habit of leaving Facebook open all day on my office computer, my wife’s friends contacted her with condolences on my getting sacked.[back]

And in creepier variants, they like to flirt with, harass, and cyber-stalk other players.[back]

One of the more poetic passages explaining this philosophy:

Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartener, nevertheless seemed to know what [other tennis coaches] seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, 2[to-the-n-power] possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically controlled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.[back]

As an instance of the latter, South Korea recently enacted a law requiring the use of real names on any online forum with more than 10,000 users.  This law is apparently aimed at restraining agitators or dissidents who want to anonymously criticize the government, but applies to computer games nonetheless; Blizzard Activision, the company behind several massively popular online games, is implementing a system that links in-game character names to real names (which will apply to all Blizzard games worldwide), but that may not satisfy the Korean government.  So fantasy names may be outlawed; the game world may soon feature Dwarven warriors named Pierre, and elf wizards named Shaniqua.[back]

Advertisement