Game Design: an entire discipline dedicated to selling illusions of progress, achievement, mastery and ultimately meaning. Content.
There are a stack of old consoles in my closet. The last boot, if I recall correctly, was maybe…5 years ago, I suspect. I think. It may have been 3 years ago, but an emulator proved far more convenient and fruitful.
So, here we are, along with a bundle of consoles. Hard to say whether to sell them, if it’s worth the hassle. And furthermore, would selling them be of any value to the buyer? Of course it’d be an imposition for me to assert such things. One may find plenty value in the storylines-to-play, and my blindness accrued through playing them all leaves me indifferent and pompous.
There are some games which do challenge you. There are a few unique games, so unique in how it abandons any sort of story or character, really. I mean, the best games are the ones that loosely follow the Game Design Mythos but the beauty was found between the lines. Which always sort of nagged at me when I think about it. Let’s give some examples.
Let’s take a look at Minecraft. The original alpha version and string of betas were without an End. There was no objective, other than the loose idea that you may want to maintain distance from the mobs. An open-world, with no end goal in sight, and yet one could sink thousands of hours into it.
Or World of Warcraft. In fact, I waffled most of today about whether to “give it one last go” for old times sake. For a jest, an experiment, a moment to “decompress” and other things we could whisper. Because the beauty of WoW is that it is a world to explore, and it’s the exploration–the walking simulation–the moment silence where, yeah, there are some quests and yeah, you could level up your character and grab some gear or skills, but instead we could just enjoy the Crossroad plains for a little longer. Relish in the aimlessness. Go at your own pace. Take it in.
And lastly, Team Fortress 2 and friends. There was an objective, and a scoreboard, but there was also a underbelly understanding that neither really mattered. What mattered was the objectives you set for yourself–whether to get a Steam achievement or a taunt kill. Or maybe a teleporter deep within the enemy base. Brush up on your Sniper, Scout movement, try out new weapons, or trade away for those so enamored with hats. Sure, we could state that the point was to “win” the game, but winning didn’t matter much after enough hours. Only abstractly. All that mattered is whether you could “win” in your own way.
Other games, like League of Legends or Dota 2, CounterStrike and others–yes, they’re certainly masterful constructions of Game Design Mythos, but what’s interesting is how, most of the time, players are miserable playing it. They aren’t “winning” enough and “improving” enough and in a vicious cycle to “git gud” while, all the while, in pain for it.
The same could be said for most singleplayer games. How some are certainly immersive enough, and include that element of exploration–take Skyrim, for example–and yet these don’t have as much pull in my opinion. Maybe because the objective was still in bold at the top, and you are on the storypath, and you will have to complete that storypath sooner or later.
Yet Minecraft, WoW, and TF2 break into something else. What do all of these games have in common? You could probably come up with something of your own. But I think each of these games contained something uniquely within them: the exit door.
An exit door which leaked into Real Life decision making, considerations, mild amusements, dashes of creativity that was hard to find anywhere else.
A door which led to your own imagination.
That’s what made them so lasting I think. That’s what makes them contain a strange “jewel” in their nature, though lost nowadays. The player gets a moment to reflect and become self-aware enough about their actions which have no immediate answer. The “art” becomes a mirror by which one realizes the path they’ve ultimately strayed from.
That’s what’s amusing about games. You take what you learned from them, and it seems most games don’t have much to take from. Maybe some learnings about human nature, dealing with others, choices, consequences–and yet the golden three above yielded different fruit: the fruit of your own imagination, space to look at the vortex you’re in and the self-awareness about it, the inherent aimlessness of the whole pursuit. The inherent aimlessness in your own life, but while you’re in the game it was channeled into something more.
My bold statement is that the Golden Three remind you what to do about the endless abyss of one’s attention and mind, seeking out new peoples and engagements and so on.
How the only answer to the endless abyss isn’t a monkey-branch from game-to-game, show-to-show, job-to-job, love-to-love all to return as dust.
The answer is to surrender yourself to the abyss.
Why?
Because it’s from that abyss by which the joy of WoW, Minecraft, and TF2 sprang to life.
So, “what’s next” you may wonder.
Well, what do you see when you close your eyes?