Originally intended to be posted on 3/1/2022
Haven't been writing or really, doing anything lately. I got a full-time job and the lifestyle and mindset change was pretty hard to get used to, but I am doing better at getting jobs done these days at least.
Nevertheless, creatively, spiritually, I have been in a drought lately. I had some passion and goal towards wanting to do... unorthodox normal things, but it all felt pointless. What is the point of killing games?
Throughout the short experience of working as a game "journalist", I think one of the dilemmas was that... I am not sure if people loved playing games. Or, I didn't like the way other people, a.k.a content creators talked about games. Maybe I was looking for interesting discussions revolved around game mechanics but it was full of calculated marketing nonsense. Crazy how my favorite discussion I had with others about games was in a Music discord.
Recently, I have been reading Jane McGonigal's "Reality is Broken" and I think something clicked, as in it talks about things that I actually care about. The book was actually writing about why should we care about games and how to make our real-life better through games, a conversation that I would be interested in having.
I collected random bits and pieces of the book because my memory does not exist. And so I will try to react and reflect on each talking point and develop parasocial relationships with words.
The way we use the word “Games” is a reflection of how we think about games: “don't game the system, don’t play games with me” are all examples of games enabling inappropriate, selfish, and unproductive behaviors. Games need new definitions.
Agreed. There is also a sense of “insignificant-ness” when it comes to the way we use the word games that we don’t find anywhere else. Imagine saying “It is just a book”, that would be a sign of “lack of education”. Yet, “it is just a game” is perfectly normal. It is a good point but I also think it is a step ladder for narrative development as well because even game lovers know that games tend to allow people the space to act evilly without severe consequences.
I love games and play a lot of games, but a lot of the times when I am tired of life, my thoughts in my head are a constant “I don’t want to play this game anymore”. A game that is not fun can be simply dropped, a life that is not fun keeps going on, and life is kind of a lame game where people are wired to not drop. This is why I liked McGonigal’s definition of games including the element of “Voluntary Participation”. It obviously makes sense but feels validating when reading an “expert” writing it out.
Games make us happier because they are hard work we chose for ourselves, and people become happier by doing good hard work. Gaming is an opportunity to focus our energy with relentless optimism on something we are good (getting better) at. In contrast, what we find fun is mildly depressing: Such as watching TV, relaxing, window shopping.
That feels quite resonating to read. I tried too hard to “work” after I am done with work, and that led to exhaustion, which then led to the cycle of constant instant gratification that was slowly rotting my brain. I can say I agree, a lot of the time I spent relaxing doesn’t feel fun anymore, but just that I am so habitually used to doing them.
The “games as work” analogy is amusing, I used to think of life as just a game, but never the other way around. A part of me thinks that work is impossible to be fun, but now I am remembering the times when there was always a certain embarrassment that comes with admitting that school feels fun at times, perhaps even hatred.
Games are games that we can drop and stop playing as soon as we are bored. Life is a game where once you get bored of it, you are forced to continue playing the same game. There is no punishment when the player dislikes card games, but the punishment for disliking math is shamefulness, loathing, and a “play again” menu where the no button doesn’t work and once the timer drops to zero, the dictator clicks Yes for you.
This is where all of McGonigal’s points regarding transforming our real world for the better through “gamification” come in. The book talked about these ideas with tremendous hope and excitement, but the funny thing is how many of these ideas don’t seem to be working anymore when I searched them up.
For example, Quest to Learn is a revolutionary school, it was funded by Bill Gates and hired prominent game designers to develop game-like programs to educate the child. Sounds like something huge but the search result was giving me things from 2013. How are the children in that school doing? Is the “hiding secrets in random books in library” / other game-like mechanics functional in an education setting? We never know. Many of these movements seem to lose track after a while.
The flow was most reliably produced when there are elements of Self-chosen goals, personally optimized obstacles, and continuous feedback… Failure of schools, offices, factories, and other everyday environments to provide flow is one of the most urgent problems facing humanity.
These are the ideas suggested by Csikszentmihalyi and it is fascinating. There is a “common sense” where we believe that if people “get what they want”, they will destroy the world through sheer laziness. Being alive in this world is a dictatorship in itself, and our world only reflects simply that. Until these extremely complicated sufferings are solved… Pessimists like me have no good ideas or brains. Move on.
Game designers are actively transforming what was once an intuitive art of optimizing human performance into an applied science
I think it is interesting how all the benefits of games are so real result-based when it comes to Jane McGonigal’s narrative: Games create happiness, joy, skill expression, social implications. Real-world is bad in A, B, C, but games can do D, E, F to make them better.
Art. Does art exist to simply create real-world results where people are happier and more joyful? Art is a discipline, a set of techniques, a science in itself that I haven’t learned yet. Something just feels wrong about the way things are framed.
What if I wanted to play games so that I continue suffering? This then goes back to Jane’s point regarding how extrinsic motivation such as money and fame doesn’t create human happiness and how wealth divides us through safely built houses and walls. Playing games as a way to suffer is a protest against how broken reality where we lost the hope (that I never had to begin with) around creating a world where people can work on things they love. Which is the entire point of the book, where instead of keep drowning in games we should use them to transform our real world. *COUGHS*
I guess a part of me wants to see the process of playing, discovering, and creating a game as “Magic”. The way that Jane talked about games is always about leading to a great end result of some sort and generally sounds somewhat pragmatic.
Even without a video game system, there are plenty of game-like mechanics already. In-class discussion generates real-time peer-to-peer feedback, writing essays and journals well and you get a high score… The greatest video game of all time, I would want to quit after playing it for an hour the same way certain classes make me want to quit.
Nevertheless, less top-down classroom structure and more participation sound like a good idea on paper, but the fundamental problem still lies in that school is involuntary participation. The player base in my old university was “out of it” no matter how engaging the course content was, and that affect the rest of the player base.
Schools should add mechanics where negative behaviors are punished through a tribunal system and automate detections for unwanted in-game behaviors to increase the engagement of the player base because these behaviors make everyone else’s in-game experience worse! Is this League of Legends? Or school? Or the “dystopic” China? Or the dystopic republic of the world?
3/13/2022
I wanted to continue the chat but haven’t been reading this book recently and my motivation for things die out quickly recently. I do appreciate all the work done to explore the real-world implication of games. It is really easy for game designers to lose the sense of what they want to create and why they want to create, and books like these make it clear how it is more than just a game. We use it to build communities, enrich lives, relax, and.
NAH. Not really in that type of mood today. I guess I am stuck in Computer Nihilism again today. Not that I necessarily am saying that “life is purposeless” but that my behavior is so “controlled” that I am not really living a life.
It feels like it is the same. I visit Reddit, then visit Reddit, then visit YouTube a bit, then visit Reddit and I never stop. It is an issue that I felt like I was having since 7 years ago? But I just can’t stop it. Partly because I have no way of socializing IRL and Reddit is like a quick burst of it without having to make any real commitment at the same time.
The algorithm, the web is just all about developing simple, quick behaviors and it feels like I have given up thinking at all. Well, I never feel like I “think” too much. Sometimes, life is too weird and tiring to want to think I suppose.
Games in a sense are not about escaping the real world, but it is a hobby for me to escape the monotony of the internet and the sense of lack of control. It is something that I can focus on, it is something that conveys much more meaning than doom scrolling, it is a spiritual artifact for the non-religious. Games have now become a tool of escapism for escaping other forms of escapism, the other forms of escapism are tools for escaping institutions that pretend their forms of escapism are completely real and shun anyone who doesn’t believe in it.
Anyhow, have some quotes from the earlier chapters of the book then:
"Endgame" is the highest stake work, the most challenging and hardest work, but also the most invigorating and confidence-building work there are to do. But the endgame is not the point of MMO, the possibility of reaching the highest level is simply a justification for doing what they love the most: Getting better.
Jonathan Blow on Braid: “Some reviewers think that the game lack replayability, but people use the "predictability" of the levels to turn into an experience of helping others through watching.”
This one is actually interesting to discuss. I think that really illustrates the “unpredictability” nature of games. For “Wordle”, I see the game and after playing 3 rounds I notice the pattern of “Oh if I just do X every game then I will win 95% of the time”, the same way that a Trading Card Game can be “solved” as there is no more avenue to explore.
Yet, the players themselves decide to invent ways to make the game harder and more challenging to play, to increase variability. What is a clear “oversimplification” and “overhyped” dumb game for me, is the one that made other people willingly put out an effort to make the simple game more complex because they want to.
A lot of the time, our own critiques of games are out of touch with how other people could behave and react towards the game. It is always interesting when that happens: “No replayability”, why should games be replayable? “It is only a 2 hours long game”, a 2 hours long movie is hard to sit through why should games be 100+? Then there are things related to how the developers of the game failed to build a community when communities are often built by the players themselves. Which is connected to the next quote:
Prosocial emotions that we get from gaming aren't necessarily built into game design, but simply a side effect of people spending too much time together playing... Allows people room to express admiration to each other, devote themselves to common goals, express sympathy for losses, and fall in love.
Social deduction games are great examples of this. I am still a part of the werewolf.es community despite not playing the game for a year now. There is no design that says “go ahead and chat with each other about things you never thought you would” but it just happened because we play with each other so much.
Ambient sociability: When playing WoW, even when people aren't socializing with each other, they feel a high degree of "social presence". It may not create social bonds but does satisfy our craving to feel connected to each other.
This is why I will never use Spotify. I am very introverted but there is very little ambient sociability built into that app the same way it is built in Xiami/Bandcamp. I think reading what people say about music can contribute hugely to helping me enjoy and want to explore more music out there.
I really miss reading what that one mentally unstable Chinese guy has to say about what he considers to be masterpieces. The way he asks for music that represents winter and then shuns others for giving him suggestions that don’t fit his vision of “winter” is quite intriguing. His huge playlist of Visual Novel music was very eye-opening for me since I had an idea of “rate every Visual Novel song in the world”.
For introverts and the lonely ones, this ambient socialization is, life-saving I suppose. Because my head wasn’t in the right place when I tried quitting social media and didn’t replace them with any new forms of socialization. Maybe this is revisionist and it is actually just entirely due to my complete and utter lack of discipline but still, I love reading what other people have to say and being on the sideline without actually participating in the conversation.
Okay, that is all from me for now. I will try to quit using the computer after the drafting tournament tomorrow Then I will hopefully do some reading, cleaning, moving, planning, and learning something new.