Commentary

Gaming -- Or, Learning the Machine's Language

It's hard to write about mobile media and marketing without writing frequently and seriously about gaming. As I opined a week ago, play remains one of the driving forces behind the mobile migration and accounts for a remarkable amount of the time we spend with devices.
And designers talk ad nauseum about “gamification” of other apps. This usually results in embedding some sort of interactive animation or, worse, a rewards or “Good job” encouragement layer that is more cloying than engaging.

I get the sense that we talk a lot about interactive gaming without thinking much about what we really are doing when we play games. I know that I have different modes of gaming. For example, there are the purely therapeutic experiences of many casual games, like the M.C. Escher-inspired Monument Valley. Here the challenges are modest so as not to frustrate. We're playing to unwind, so hitting a challenge wall is not part of the program.

And then there are games where something more about one’s self is at stake. Twitch games, of course, are tests of prowess and reflex. From my earliest days playing Nintendo and PC twitch games it always struck me that the learn-by-failing approach most gamers take had some kind of cultural relevance to our age. Generally you learn how to outwit a level by dying at the hands of unexpected challenges. A games critic and researcher years ago contended that the first generation of digital game players came into the workforce with different approaches to professional challenges. They were more fearless, the theory went, about failing fast and learning.

Coming at this insight in another direction, you could also say that digital games have a social/cultural dimension. They are also about outwitting a rigged system. The coder is the master, setting up obstacles and rules that have no larger value or meaning. It is the player’s job to decode the patterns, detect the underlying rules informing the machine/enemy’s behavior, and then skirt or penetrate it.

Calling gaming “escapist” entertainment is a hollow diagnosis. The point is not that we need to “escape,” but what worlds we choose to escape to -- and what relation do they have to the world as experienced.

The great social historian John F. Kasson analyzed the amusement park Coney Island at the turn of the 20th century as an escape that actually immersed visitors in the realities of a quickly changing industrial society. Its mechanized amusements acclimated people to the very machines that would come to define their work life. At the time, some saw public bathing and screaming with fear during rides as scandalous behavior.   But these post-Victorian behaviors were precisely the kinds of expressiveness needed to drive a coming culture of consumption and the advertising that would rationalize it. In essence, Kasson argues, Coney Island was a laboratory for modern times.

Which makes me wonder what sort of laboratory for modern times digital gaming might be. The question is too large for this column. But I have long wondered if the very structure of modern video games is embedded with an existential vision about how the world itself works. Is it really about learning to game an arbitrary system? Rewarding our skill at thinking inside the box? 

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