Games are grotesque.
I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again.
In this way, games are different from other media. Sure, a movie or a book or a painting can depict squalor, can attune us to the agony of misfortune. But unlike film and literature, games do not primarily depict human events and tell stories. And unlike sports, games do not primarily showcase physical prowess. We don’t watch or read games like we do cinema and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. But something else is at work in games. Games are devices we operate.
Sometimes that operation simulates piloting a mecha or a pro athlete or a space marine, but more frequently it entails more mundane activities: moving cards between stacks as in Klondike solitaire; swapping adjacent gems as in Bejeweled; directing a circular, discarnate maw as in Pac-Man. Some machinery is fantastic, but most is ordinary, forgettable, broken.
If you look past the familiar shimmer of Super Mario Bros. and Super Bowl Sunday, there in the middle you will find the unsung paragons of gaming: games like Chess and Go and Backgammon; Tic-Tac-Toe and Dots and Boxes and Crosswords; Monopoly and Candy Land and Sorry!. These are games that frustrate more than they titillate, because operating them involves minimal effort yet considerable misery. It’s not the misery of boredom or stupidity, but the misery of repetition. The misery of knowing what you want to accomplish but not being able to, whether thanks to the plodding pace of a child’s board game, or the bottomless strategic depth of a folk classic. Whereas football yields its beauty through the practiced triumph of the human body and will over circumstance, Sorry! delivers only the stupid, gratuitous anguish caused by our decision to play it in the first place.
Every now and then a game comes along that forces us to admit this inconvenient truth of games. Recently, we have been graced with such a one, a free mobile throwaway called Flappy Bird. The game was first released last summer, but as the year wound down it experienced an unexpected surge in popularity. By the start of 2014, the game had nested itself at the top of the Apple App Store free charts.
Flappy Bird is a stupid game. You control a bird so cute as to signal deformity. Tapping the screen causes the bird to flap, making it rise slightly before quickly falling. The game asks only that you pilot the bird through narrow passageways between two green, Super Mario-style pipes that issue from the top and bottom of the screen. A point is awarded for every pipe you pass. But touch anything and the cute bird tumbles beak-first into the ground: game over.
I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again.
In this way, games are different from other media. Sure, a movie or a book or a painting can depict squalor, can attune us to the agony of misfortune. But unlike film and literature, games do not primarily depict human events and tell stories. And unlike sports, games do not primarily showcase physical prowess. We don’t watch or read games like we do cinema and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or football or Frisbee. Rather, we do something in-between with games. Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. But something else is at work in games. Games are devices we operate.
Sometimes that operation simulates piloting a mecha or a pro athlete or a space marine, but more frequently it entails more mundane activities: moving cards between stacks as in Klondike solitaire; swapping adjacent gems as in Bejeweled; directing a circular, discarnate maw as in Pac-Man. Some machinery is fantastic, but most is ordinary, forgettable, broken.
If you look past the familiar shimmer of Super Mario Bros. and Super Bowl Sunday, there in the middle you will find the unsung paragons of gaming: games like Chess and Go and Backgammon; Tic-Tac-Toe and Dots and Boxes and Crosswords; Monopoly and Candy Land and Sorry!. These are games that frustrate more than they titillate, because operating them involves minimal effort yet considerable misery. It’s not the misery of boredom or stupidity, but the misery of repetition. The misery of knowing what you want to accomplish but not being able to, whether thanks to the plodding pace of a child’s board game, or the bottomless strategic depth of a folk classic. Whereas football yields its beauty through the practiced triumph of the human body and will over circumstance, Sorry! delivers only the stupid, gratuitous anguish caused by our decision to play it in the first place.
Every now and then a game comes along that forces us to admit this inconvenient truth of games. Recently, we have been graced with such a one, a free mobile throwaway called Flappy Bird. The game was first released last summer, but as the year wound down it experienced an unexpected surge in popularity. By the start of 2014, the game had nested itself at the top of the Apple App Store free charts.
Flappy Bird is a stupid game. You control a bird so cute as to signal deformity. Tapping the screen causes the bird to flap, making it rise slightly before quickly falling. The game asks only that you pilot the bird through narrow passageways between two green, Super Mario-style pipes that issue from the top and bottom of the screen. A point is awarded for every pipe you pass. But touch anything and the cute bird tumbles beak-first into the ground: game over.
