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Minesweeper is a wonderful game. It’s a beautiful mixture of fast reflexes, quick logic, guesswork, and general problem solving skills. In addition to being a baneful time waster, it really highlighted for me the incredible way that skill-testing games can produce an altered state of high-functioning consciousness. At a certain level of skill and familiarity with the game, it can actually transform from a linear, mechanical process into something altogether more exciting, even trancelike. Play requires all sorts of cognitive abilities from the user: deductive reasoning, spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and intuition, among other things. But the aggregation of these abilities, in combination with speed and a certain quality of – yes – mindlessness, can produce an incredible mental transformation.
Andrew, chief editor supreme of Little Bo Beep, seated on his gilded bodily evacuation receptacle and perfumed douche machine, opened yet another gaming magazine special issue devoted entirely to his blog. Yawning, he forced the magazine through an overflowing slot in the wall labelled “Celebratory Printed Materials Recycling” and deactivated the automated pedicure device and flowery scented wafting valve. He washed his hands and opened the door to the raised somatic purification facility, but not before winking slyly at the poster of John Tesh pasted on the inside of the door, and stepped down from the facility’s dais to the main floor of the Little Bo Beep headquarters.
Surely Bob Dylan never imagined his classic refrain, “How many roads must a man walk down…” being adapted to the language of video gaming, but here goes: “How many games must a man walk down, before they call him a man?” The answer is probably non-denumerably infinite, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just offer the more reasonable, and decidedly finite, 361! (factorial), which happens to be the number of possible moves extant at the beginning of a game of Go. Now rumour has it that’s a number larger than the total quantity of particles in the entire universe (a figure also exceeded by the possibilities of synaptic combinations in the brain, interestingly enough). What does this tell us?
Why do we play games? The obvious answer, and doubtlessly true, is that we play games in order to be entertained, but that seems altogether too simplistic and easy an answer. The sources of entertainment in our culture are legion; our choices are abundant and ever changing. Why are games rapidly becoming the most lucrative and pervasive form of entertainment in the world? They may not yet have completely usurped the dominance of film and television, but they are quickly gaining ground. Why? What is their appeal to our culture? Does their relevance reside purely on the generic level of Western affluence (which can afford the ostentation of electronic amusement?) Or does it extend beyond civilization, to something innate in what it means to be human, and alive?
Me hope momma be proud. Me grow big for to smash good guys.
Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, famously argued that objects of art, with the advent of film, lost the aura of being the direct, unique, and original products of an artist. By following templates, music and film pushed art into a mode of mechanized reproduction; the original became just a model for the production of copies...
Video games occupy a rare and incredible position in culture. They are a relatively new medium that is just beginning to attain a level of almost universal saturation. They are also being made by people with highly developed artistic sensibilities, raising powerful and important questions about their relationship to art. In the recent TEDx talk at USC, Kellee Santiago defends the thesis that video games are art. She does this, perhaps somewhat weakly, by employing an easy Wikipedia definition that states:
We can cite their names like the holy litany of computer role-playing games: Baldur's Gate I and II, Planescape: Torment, and (to a lesser extent) Icewind Dale I & II. They are all unified by the now dated, but once sacrosanct Infinity Engine, which I love like my own future hypothetical child. They, alongside Fallout 1 and 2, are the greatest gifts Black Isle Studios gave to posterity.
"Dude, you totally just Starcrafted my ammo; I am so gonna Mario your mom," says one gamer to another, by way of insult, and thus with a proverbial mesotron rifle places the last, gleaming bolt of missile energy into the exposed forehead of "linguistic integrity". You don't have to be an Oxbridge Grammarian with a pipe permanently glued to your upper lip and whose definition of a "good night with a lady" is an intimate fireside read of Austin to have your forelocks raised in pre-emptive worry about the State of Things...
So Borderlands is alright, if you like wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland literally teeming with alien monsters who haemorrhage weapons and ammunition, legions of bandits hurling their bodies onto the barrels of your guns, and a non-existent story whose entire purpose is to propel you ineluctably on to a final confrontation with a giant Lovecraftian beast reminiscent of Cthulhu.
Surprising news from Bethesda today. Still glowing from their not altogether surprising success with Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks inadvertently let slip early this morning that a certain, potentially biblical game was in the works. Executive Producer and Game Director Todd Howard declared at 1:00am EST, via twitter, that, "We're up to something big, and let me just say you might need a day of rest when you're done with it."
What is escapism? I'm not going to turn to psychology journals for this one, but rather attempt to reference my own personal experience. I had a lot of problems growing up: video games offered me a wonderful analgesic against the suffering of my existence. I was pretty miserable for a while, especially as a teenager. I could turn on a video game and lose myself in its colours, interactivity, problem-solving, and narrative. If the game was especially boring or repetitive (like minesweeper), I would often find myself inventing elaborate storylines to correspond with my various actions in game.
