Utne Reader cover story on games
It’s available on the web, and it argues that games may be driving gamers to be more conformist — because they teach you to solve the problems presented, not to break out of patterns and truly innovate. As part of the basis for this argument, the author uses my book a fair amount.
But I think it’s a mistake to perceive the ordinary daily play of games as being the only way to engage with games. In the book I presented a grid of engagement that was derived from this old post to MUD-Dev. I think that even though games may primarily teach you to, well, move through the game, they also encourage engagement in other ways — these days, often explicitly. So I don’t have nearly as negative a takeaway here as the author of this piece does, though I do think that it’s important to consider what limitations games have in terms of how and what they teach.
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I think Utne is probably right on this one, Raph, and you’re going to have to do some fast-tap dancing and invoke open-ended games or games with user-driven content or something to lift us out of the rat maze. Engaging with a rat maze with pellet dispensors doesn’t mean we’re more awake and aware, it might merely mean we’re hungry.
"Old" cover story reprinted from The Wilson Quarterly, Summer 2006.
Given the date of the article, Prokofy, I think Raph can take his time with a slow waltz.
Or you could argue that games train gamers to assume that there’s always a solution, and to keep plugging away at it (determination) or changing your tack (innovation) until it’s solved.
I agree with Prokofy, the insistence that game implies an optimization was the fatal flaw I found in A Theory of Fun; illustrating the “complete model” of game design (though they were great illustrations ;). I’m trying to move beyond that with a casual game prototype design as we speak, so we’ll see if I can’t shut up those soy milk chugging, whiney hippies at Utne with some really creatively conducive gameplay.
You only have to play WoWarcraft to see how untrue this is.
Players are constantly looking for creative solutions to thein-game challenges. Look at all the nerfs, work-arounds, exploits, warnings that have been issued in the two years in has been alive.
They are not concerned with doing it the “right” way, they want to pursue the easiest or fastest way.
Hmm, I think everyone should read the article before jumping to conclusions.
I thought it covered most of the bases in a balanced manner. The only issue was whether you agree with this conclusions or not.
His conclusion was “Our video-game brains, trained on success machines, may be undergoing a Mr. Universe workout, one that leaves us stronger but less flexible.”
Well, video games are success machines in the same way slot machines or video poker is, but video games can and are more than mere success machines.
Frank
I think games DO imply optimization, but that’s like saying music implies rhythm — it’s hardly the only way to look at the matter. In the post I referenced (and in the book), I charted out twelve different means of engagement — eleven of which weren’t “beating the game” — one of them, Patrick, is your favorite, analysis. 😉
So, in other words, you have to cook up some meta-response that the user makes in a rote game where he’s grinding away in order to make it seem like he’s not programmed and learning obedience — and that’s what I mean, a quick tap-dance to get at user-content — which is what it is.
Well, not all games are about learning obedience. Would you say that Chess is?
I recently discovered and read Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad is Good for You”, which was quite delish, IMO. I was ready to recommend it to a bunch of people when I realized that they had all probably seen it already.
Article said, So don’t worry that video games are teaching us to be killers. Worry instead that they’re teaching us to salute.
Yeah, and who’s the big innovator of games? The Army. *gasp* Surprise!
Despite all that, I need to point out: how do you teach someone how to innovate? Books can’t do it: they’re a fiat narrative. So are movies. You need interactivity, first, and then you need paideia. The best teachers of innovators are first real world scenarios, like throwing you into a job and making you swim, and second games with loose constraints, but well-defined objectives. That is to say, simulations of the above real world scenarios.
Yes, Raph, chess is about learning obedience to the rigid rules of chess, and becoming so slavishly mindful of them that they become second nature to you, so you can think up various strategies and variations. You’re never going to be using chess to do other things like take a picture or answer your email or go shopping. It’s just chess. It’s a game. It teaches slavish obedience. And unfortunately, the video games of today which are much, much cruder variants on the ancient game of chess, teach it more, without all the development of the intellectual strategies (though some could argue like Ito that playing WoW and having a panel as complex as a 747 airplane, and coordinating raids with 40 people with all the complex rules of WoW, is preparing people for some complex sophisticated role in modern life and business — you could also argue that it’s just preparing them better for more games, and at best, making life like a game filled with slavish obedience).
I’m not going to portray social software or SL as an open-ended world as somehow not containing just as much obedience-dictation as games. Maybe they have even more exigencies and more subtle and effective ways of social control. I’m just saying that it seems possible to think and do more with them.
[…] The be-bearded Raph Koster handily points to an extremely interesting Utne Reader cover story on games, written by Chris Suellentrop (who covers games for Slate on occasion, I believe). […]
I’m not certain that I buy Suellentrop’s final point. Sure, games are set rigidly within their own logic–logic that demands a sort of conformity on the part of the player. But playing a game is largely about decoding that logic and laying its mechanics bare. The player is developing a body of knowledge allowing him to see that that particular game’s mechanic can be manipulated towards his own needs. Outside that, the player is developing skills that will allow him to create those bodies of knowledge with greater ease. It’s not critical thinking, per se, but it’s a skill-set that fits in nicely with critical thinking. Being able to figure out the logic of a system is a necessary step towards thinking critically about it.
Remember, ideological conformity–which is what Suellentrop fears–doesn’t necessitate critical thinking, and in fact finds it threatening.
What Suellentrop’s fear of ideological conformity rests on is the idea that gamers will mistake the unchanging and clean logic of video games with the messy and mutable logic of ideology. But I think that if you are creating a skill-set that allows you develop bodies of knowledge about logic systems, you’d be able to recognize the difference between a rigid system and a mutable one, and how to manipulate both as needed.
Expecting every individual game to give complete freedom is missing the point: the power of games is to provide a set of rules and constraints within which you defeat the bad guys, solve the mystery, explore the world etc. Hell, movies aren’t even interactive but I think we agree it’s rewarding and useful to watch them.
I don’t think games teach a single way of thinking because most people are exposed to more than one of them. Perhaps an individual game only teaches how to solve that one problem, but games en masse teach a whole range of problem solving skills and expose you to all sorts of varied worlds and stories–albeit not as varied as they could be.
Now whether games actually present a wide enough spectrum of experiences is another question: right now you still have to hunt pretty hard to find the unique ones. That’s something the industry will have to address if games are to be seen as anything more than toys by the public.