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silveradept[This is part of a series on video games, their tropes, stories of playing games, and other related topics. We've filled all the remaining spots for this year. It's been great having you along for the ride, and I hope reading all of this has been interesting, and possibly even the occasional bit of informative as well.]
Media are always a curious combination of ideas. If you subscribe to the philosophy that there are no new stories to be told, and that everything we do is different variations on the theme, there's obviously mre than enough of those variations that are good to keep people coming back for more of them. As we saw earlier in the series, each new mode of storytelling gets scrutinized and complained as the thing that will corrupt youth and fundamentally change the perfect way of life currently in existence by adding more of whatever is taboo to the mix, whether that's sex, violence, foul language, disrespect for elders, telling the truth about the rapacious nature of late-stage capitalism, speaking words that describe life as it is, rather than as a convenient fiction that people can use to delude themselves into not acting, or any other conveniently-available scapegoat that can have all of the sins of society placed upon and then have it driven off a cliff as sacrifice. Most new media forms survive the cycle, are integrated into the society, and soon become part of normal life, often through spending a period of time censored or not exercised to their greatest creative potential so as to become safe enough for everyone to say they use or consume that form of media, or at least have it as a choice among the many possibilities they might decide upon.
This particular year's tag is "Pac-Man Fever", based on the song by Buckner and Garcia, because the song alludes to the specific form of objection that was made about the video game industry in general. Given the opportunity to play video games, there was a significant amount of worry that children wouldn't do anything other than that, neglecting their physical health, social relationships, and other parts of a well-balanced life in favor of pouring quarters into arcade machines (or repeatedly playing the games on their home consoles. I know my own parents were concerned about this, and made it a regular habit to tell me to go play outside for a while. What they were missing, in the remarkably rural space we lived in, was that there was little else to do that was stimulating other than read books and play games. When the neighbors opened their pool in the summer, we swam in it pretty routinely, and when there was snow to sled on and interact with, that happened as well. And when we wanted to play games with others, there was a great collection of board and card games to work with. It's not that there weren't opportunities, but sometimes there's nothing more interesting in your life than television and video games. And TV was in the VCR era, not the "everything on a DVR / streaming service" era, so often times, "there's nothing on" was a viable and legit complaint.
Video games managed to combine two things that were pretty high in the mind of the average U.S. Moral Guardian concerned about The Childrens. The first was that, even from the beginning, games were designed to eventually be just outside the skill and competence level of a lot of people. It's very rare that someone would be able to, with no previous experience, play Pac-Man with sufficient skill that they could reach the kill screen in a single run. But they could probably pass the first few mazes and eat (yeet?) some ghosts along the way. Plenty of people could work their way through World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers, even if they don't notice how 1-1 is a masterclass in teaching players how to play the game (The article itself takes cues from video of Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of the level and Mario himself, and Takashi Tezuka, explaining how 1-1 is a tutorial level in more ways than one.) As pointed out in the article, being frustrated by a game is often an incentive to improve on it, and if games are designed to be the right mix between achievable and frustrating, they can trigger the same sorts of brain patterns that are associated with risk and reward, to the point where there were (And still are) concerns about games becoming addictive. Lootboxes and "inexpensive" powerups are not a new thing that's suddenly making everyone concerned about addictive behavior in games, they're a much more explicit foregrounding of the interaction loop that results in someone trying for just one more level. Now, we know a little bit more about brains and things that can be either helpful or detrimental to brains and potentially addictive behaviors, and marketers are more explicitly using those things to try and get people to invest time and money in the things that the marketers want.
The other thing that they were concerned about was the interactivity of games. As we saw before, there was a significant worry that, as opposed to the passive observation of actors on a television screen, the act of pushing buttons to engage in violence, sex, or other things that a child might be tempted to engage with would be the greater problem. Mind you, this was also in the era where, for example, the local superhero troupe was doing public service announcements for small children about not replicating what they saw on screen, because, well, there were plenty of studies to prove that expsure to violence meant increased levels of aggression. So that particular message could be found everywhere, including exhortations to parents to curb the violence intake for their children. If we want to be honest, video games were just one possible avenue of violence and sex where the Childrens might be exposed. And, unsurprisingly, many of those selfsame children would roll their eyes at such public service announcements or attempts at a parent to get too involved in their media choices. Like they do now. And, we might note, the violence in most children's media is pretty fantastical. It's the violence in adult media that borders on the realistic.
Surely if there were a way of removing both of those elements from games, they could be made safe for everyone to enjoy and play. Except, the things that are most concerning about video games are also the things that are the best about video games. Games that are designed with the right kind of difficulty curve in mind are ones that give the player a real sense of accomplishment when they gain expertise and mastery and execute technically complicated maneuvers that look cool and make significant amounts of progress in the game. There's a certain amount of leaning-in to this idea for things like the stylish action genre or the giant amount of effects put in place for ultimate moves or supers so that they look extremely cool while also doing huge amounts of damage. If it looks good, then it's effective, or so the thinking goes. Which isn't always the case, actually, as there are times where the remarkably boring thing is the thing that's actually the most effective and tends to get used, especially if you're the like me where you eventually get equipment where you never need anything more than the basic attack patterns to do lethal damage to the opponent. (It's a good thing. Where I cannot win in skill, I more than make up for in numbers, and the game is still enjoyable that way.) So once you've got the game going, and if you slip into a flow state, it can be pretty easy to spend a lot of time making progress (or grinding toward progress, anyway) so that you come out with time spent, but a feeling of accomplishment at what you did. Even more so if you made progress toward completing a speedrun or mapping things out in such a way that you can eventually speedrun it or utilize advanced tricks to make the gameplay easier. It's a regular feedback loop present in other games, as well - learn new technique, put technique to use, evaluate the effects, see whether techniques can be combined, continue to improve and learn, and then put that learning back to use into the game. Video games are being tuned so that the feedback loop is just right for the kind of player the game wants to attract, even if they don't know they're going to be someone who plays and invests time and effort in that game yet. Like other psychological tools, this can be used for good or evil. And there's enough evil already in place there to make us suspicious of the whole thing.
As for the other part of it, the interactivity is the draw to video games. There's no getting around that many of us like having a certain amount of control over the protagonist's adventure and existence. Especially those of us who might otherwise feel like we don't have a lot of control over anything else in our lives. There's always the grain of truth to the vicious stereotypes like the incel and the basement-dwelling NEET and the SWATter and all the other things that the "gamer"-type community does to themselves and others that gives gaming and being passionate about games a bad name. Most of the time, there's something cathartic, relaxing, or otherwise helpful for bleeding off negative emotions by splattering a few pixels, playing some solitaire, or otherwise giving the body and brain something to concentrate on other than the thing(s) that are upsetting them at that particular moment. Being able to push buttons and do things is useful, rather than being a passive viewer of someone else's things. The more that we learn about brains and attitudes and cultural upbringings, the more we find out that a person who commits mass violence or calls in false threats or behaves in a terrible manner toward others (or themselves) has something in their physical life that fits reasonably well as a cause, even if a digital interaction is the thing that is the flashpoint for what happens afterward. Which is not to say that media can portray anything in any manner whatsoever and there will be no consequences, because media portrayal is often very good at helping set and shape attitudes toward other groups. Whether something is "normal" or "weird" or "interlopers!" is often a function of how much and what kind of media representation they have. Games can be one way of experiencing storytelling from a different perspective, for learning about how life is like for other people, other groups, and examining one's own perceptions about the other and the self. Sometimes it's about creating things with voxels and blocks in the same way that one might build a giant creation of toy bricks, but that takes up less space on the dining room table. Sometimes it's fiercely competitive, sometimes it's looking for the most awesome combo, sometimes it's trying to find new ways to get through the game quickly. And sometimes it's about carving through hordes of inhuman entities with your trusty weapon(s) and setting right what went terribly wrong on a worldwide scale. Good games, like other good examples of media, have the potential to be life-changing. Entertaining games might not be life-changing, but still fun to spend time on.
And, if all of this series hasn't made clear, there's a lot of things about games that are worth further discussion, analysis, and flail-squee about. Or grumble-grouse about. And it's a relatively young medium, so there's still a lot out there to explore and discover and remix into new and interesting ways. There's still a lot of great games to come out, and I'm looking forward to seeing them. (Even though there will be a lot of crap games in between.)
Media are always a curious combination of ideas. If you subscribe to the philosophy that there are no new stories to be told, and that everything we do is different variations on the theme, there's obviously mre than enough of those variations that are good to keep people coming back for more of them. As we saw earlier in the series, each new mode of storytelling gets scrutinized and complained as the thing that will corrupt youth and fundamentally change the perfect way of life currently in existence by adding more of whatever is taboo to the mix, whether that's sex, violence, foul language, disrespect for elders, telling the truth about the rapacious nature of late-stage capitalism, speaking words that describe life as it is, rather than as a convenient fiction that people can use to delude themselves into not acting, or any other conveniently-available scapegoat that can have all of the sins of society placed upon and then have it driven off a cliff as sacrifice. Most new media forms survive the cycle, are integrated into the society, and soon become part of normal life, often through spending a period of time censored or not exercised to their greatest creative potential so as to become safe enough for everyone to say they use or consume that form of media, or at least have it as a choice among the many possibilities they might decide upon.
This particular year's tag is "Pac-Man Fever", based on the song by Buckner and Garcia, because the song alludes to the specific form of objection that was made about the video game industry in general. Given the opportunity to play video games, there was a significant amount of worry that children wouldn't do anything other than that, neglecting their physical health, social relationships, and other parts of a well-balanced life in favor of pouring quarters into arcade machines (or repeatedly playing the games on their home consoles. I know my own parents were concerned about this, and made it a regular habit to tell me to go play outside for a while. What they were missing, in the remarkably rural space we lived in, was that there was little else to do that was stimulating other than read books and play games. When the neighbors opened their pool in the summer, we swam in it pretty routinely, and when there was snow to sled on and interact with, that happened as well. And when we wanted to play games with others, there was a great collection of board and card games to work with. It's not that there weren't opportunities, but sometimes there's nothing more interesting in your life than television and video games. And TV was in the VCR era, not the "everything on a DVR / streaming service" era, so often times, "there's nothing on" was a viable and legit complaint.
Video games managed to combine two things that were pretty high in the mind of the average U.S. Moral Guardian concerned about The Childrens. The first was that, even from the beginning, games were designed to eventually be just outside the skill and competence level of a lot of people. It's very rare that someone would be able to, with no previous experience, play Pac-Man with sufficient skill that they could reach the kill screen in a single run. But they could probably pass the first few mazes and eat (yeet?) some ghosts along the way. Plenty of people could work their way through World 1-1 of Super Mario Brothers, even if they don't notice how 1-1 is a masterclass in teaching players how to play the game (The article itself takes cues from video of Shigeru Miyamoto, designer of the level and Mario himself, and Takashi Tezuka, explaining how 1-1 is a tutorial level in more ways than one.) As pointed out in the article, being frustrated by a game is often an incentive to improve on it, and if games are designed to be the right mix between achievable and frustrating, they can trigger the same sorts of brain patterns that are associated with risk and reward, to the point where there were (And still are) concerns about games becoming addictive. Lootboxes and "inexpensive" powerups are not a new thing that's suddenly making everyone concerned about addictive behavior in games, they're a much more explicit foregrounding of the interaction loop that results in someone trying for just one more level. Now, we know a little bit more about brains and things that can be either helpful or detrimental to brains and potentially addictive behaviors, and marketers are more explicitly using those things to try and get people to invest time and money in the things that the marketers want.
The other thing that they were concerned about was the interactivity of games. As we saw before, there was a significant worry that, as opposed to the passive observation of actors on a television screen, the act of pushing buttons to engage in violence, sex, or other things that a child might be tempted to engage with would be the greater problem. Mind you, this was also in the era where, for example, the local superhero troupe was doing public service announcements for small children about not replicating what they saw on screen, because, well, there were plenty of studies to prove that expsure to violence meant increased levels of aggression. So that particular message could be found everywhere, including exhortations to parents to curb the violence intake for their children. If we want to be honest, video games were just one possible avenue of violence and sex where the Childrens might be exposed. And, unsurprisingly, many of those selfsame children would roll their eyes at such public service announcements or attempts at a parent to get too involved in their media choices. Like they do now. And, we might note, the violence in most children's media is pretty fantastical. It's the violence in adult media that borders on the realistic.
Surely if there were a way of removing both of those elements from games, they could be made safe for everyone to enjoy and play. Except, the things that are most concerning about video games are also the things that are the best about video games. Games that are designed with the right kind of difficulty curve in mind are ones that give the player a real sense of accomplishment when they gain expertise and mastery and execute technically complicated maneuvers that look cool and make significant amounts of progress in the game. There's a certain amount of leaning-in to this idea for things like the stylish action genre or the giant amount of effects put in place for ultimate moves or supers so that they look extremely cool while also doing huge amounts of damage. If it looks good, then it's effective, or so the thinking goes. Which isn't always the case, actually, as there are times where the remarkably boring thing is the thing that's actually the most effective and tends to get used, especially if you're the like me where you eventually get equipment where you never need anything more than the basic attack patterns to do lethal damage to the opponent. (It's a good thing. Where I cannot win in skill, I more than make up for in numbers, and the game is still enjoyable that way.) So once you've got the game going, and if you slip into a flow state, it can be pretty easy to spend a lot of time making progress (or grinding toward progress, anyway) so that you come out with time spent, but a feeling of accomplishment at what you did. Even more so if you made progress toward completing a speedrun or mapping things out in such a way that you can eventually speedrun it or utilize advanced tricks to make the gameplay easier. It's a regular feedback loop present in other games, as well - learn new technique, put technique to use, evaluate the effects, see whether techniques can be combined, continue to improve and learn, and then put that learning back to use into the game. Video games are being tuned so that the feedback loop is just right for the kind of player the game wants to attract, even if they don't know they're going to be someone who plays and invests time and effort in that game yet. Like other psychological tools, this can be used for good or evil. And there's enough evil already in place there to make us suspicious of the whole thing.
As for the other part of it, the interactivity is the draw to video games. There's no getting around that many of us like having a certain amount of control over the protagonist's adventure and existence. Especially those of us who might otherwise feel like we don't have a lot of control over anything else in our lives. There's always the grain of truth to the vicious stereotypes like the incel and the basement-dwelling NEET and the SWATter and all the other things that the "gamer"-type community does to themselves and others that gives gaming and being passionate about games a bad name. Most of the time, there's something cathartic, relaxing, or otherwise helpful for bleeding off negative emotions by splattering a few pixels, playing some solitaire, or otherwise giving the body and brain something to concentrate on other than the thing(s) that are upsetting them at that particular moment. Being able to push buttons and do things is useful, rather than being a passive viewer of someone else's things. The more that we learn about brains and attitudes and cultural upbringings, the more we find out that a person who commits mass violence or calls in false threats or behaves in a terrible manner toward others (or themselves) has something in their physical life that fits reasonably well as a cause, even if a digital interaction is the thing that is the flashpoint for what happens afterward. Which is not to say that media can portray anything in any manner whatsoever and there will be no consequences, because media portrayal is often very good at helping set and shape attitudes toward other groups. Whether something is "normal" or "weird" or "interlopers!" is often a function of how much and what kind of media representation they have. Games can be one way of experiencing storytelling from a different perspective, for learning about how life is like for other people, other groups, and examining one's own perceptions about the other and the self. Sometimes it's about creating things with voxels and blocks in the same way that one might build a giant creation of toy bricks, but that takes up less space on the dining room table. Sometimes it's fiercely competitive, sometimes it's looking for the most awesome combo, sometimes it's trying to find new ways to get through the game quickly. And sometimes it's about carving through hordes of inhuman entities with your trusty weapon(s) and setting right what went terribly wrong on a worldwide scale. Good games, like other good examples of media, have the potential to be life-changing. Entertaining games might not be life-changing, but still fun to spend time on.
And, if all of this series hasn't made clear, there's a lot of things about games that are worth further discussion, analysis, and flail-squee about. Or grumble-grouse about. And it's a relatively young medium, so there's still a lot out there to explore and discover and remix into new and interesting ways. There's still a lot of great games to come out, and I'm looking forward to seeing them. (Even though there will be a lot of crap games in between.)
