Are Games Good?

Or what?

David Hockney, Tennis Court - Berkley - November 1971

In this recent thread Paolo Pedercini raises some interesting questions about my book, The Beauty of Games. After some fulsome praise that I am too modest to repeat, Paolo makes the following points:

By centering the player's pleasure, it occasionally falls into tautology: games are beautiful because they are compelling, and they are compelling because they are beautiful. Consequently, it kinda waxes poetic about gambling and doesn't spend much time on designed addiction.

The book tries to talk about ALL games, and only in positive terms, so the latter half falls in the common "games advocacy" position: all games are fundamentally beautiful and they are already making the world a better place.

The main issue with such an acritical take is that it doesn't give game makers much to think about: what we do is already awesome, we only have to convince the normies of this...

Imho a discussion on the beauty of games should also delve into how games can be ugly, evil, and bad. Maybe Frank is too kind and classy for that. Maybe that's just a position a (former) director of a game program can't afford to have.

I think this is an extremely good reading that gets at some important fundamental issues. I do worry about the book being seen as an uncritical panegyric - “yay games!” On the other hand, since I was aware of this danger and took some pains to avoid it, I want to explain my approach and see if I can defend the thinking behind it.

Let’s start with the tautology charge - games are beautiful because compelling, and compelling because beautiful. Here I think the real issue is the central framing of the book - that games are an aesthetic form - and the perspective on aesthetics, as a domain, that the book takes - which is that it doesn’t reduce. Which is to say: you can’t map the value or purpose or function of aesthetics back to some other framework in order to explain or justify it. This may seem like a cop out, but I don’t know any way around it, and in the book I attempt, at least, to acknowledge this dilemma and guide readers through it. But, yeah, since I don’t ground my appreciation of games in some other value system, the result is going to seem somewhat tautological, in the sense that it is self-contained, free-standing, independent.

What does it look like when we do try to ground games in this way? Well, we can explain them by pointing to how they evolved, and illuminating the various social and psychological incentives that motivate people to play them. We can justify them by demonstrating how they influence our behavior, how they teach and instruct, how they produce knowledge and insight. We can point to them as a source of pleasure, which is perhaps the most common way to ground them in the “ordinary” world. This is one that I try hard to avoid, despite Paolo’s claim that I “center the player’s pleasure.” It’s not uncommon to encounter, among some game designers, a pseudo-scientific approach where the ultimate purpose of games is seen as their ability to dole out pleasure-units. I can’t remember if I use the phrase “hedonic appliances” in the book to dismiss this framing of videogames. If I didn’t I should have.

One specific way of grounding games in a non-aesthetic value framework is to consider them within a context of social progress and political struggle. Given the nature of Paolo’s games I imagine this is the particular context whose absence in my approach he especially misses.

In my approach, I resist using any external value framework as an ultimate set of criteria against which to measure games’ worth - not purpose, not pleasure, not politics. This is not to say that I ignore all of the complicated ways that games interact with purpose, pleasure, and politics, the book is full of references to the connections games have with these frameworks. It’s just that I refuse to use any of them as the final arbiter, the universal yardstick, the cartesian grid against which games can be splayed out, pinned down, and evaluated.

This refusal is not an attempt to shield games from critical scrutiny. It is an attempt to make the most accurate and honest analysis of what it means for something to be an aesthetic domain. If you can’t explain games by saying that, ultimately, they allow us to learn important lessons and develop valuable behaviors. If you can’t justify them by showing how they provide pleasure or by pointing to the specific ways they improve the world, then how can you explain them at all? How can you justify them at all? And my answer is - you can’t. But that’s ok, because you don’t need to.

Explanation and justification are the alpha and omega of the real world. The ordinary world. The regular world we actually live in. And it is the nature of aesthetics to open up a space alongside that world, next to it, woven through it, in constant conversation with it, but not of it. Not contained by it. Not subservient to it. That this other world can only exist in relation to the real one, that all of its meaning and beauty and power comes from that relationship, doesn’t diminish its independent status, because, to a certain degree, the inverse is also true.

If someone made this claim about music or literature, you might nod in agreement. We are used to treating songs and stories as mysterious and sacred. But games? Games are low status, the realm of children, nerds, jocks, and gamers. Surely games need to be explained and justified. Moreover, games themselves are chock-full of explanation and justification, precise measurement and explicit evaluation. That’s the main thing we do in games - solve problems and achieve goals, sort outcomes along a spectrum of good to bad and expend energy figuring out how to navigate the space between. And you’re trying to tell me that games, despite being comprised entirely of these things, is not, ultimately, beholden to them? Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. I know it’s absurd, but I also know it’s true.

Is my approach a form of “game advocacy”? Am I claiming that “all games are fundamentally beautiful and already making the world a better place”? That’s a hard question. What I’m trying to do is be accurate and truthful and describe what games are, what they do, what we do with them. Mostly, I think games are interesting. I think they are more interesting than most people realize. I want people to look at them, and see what’s interesting about them. I don’t think games make the world a better place, it’s actually much worse than that, I think games, like other artforms, make the world a place.

So, where does this leave me, vis a vis the accusation that I am soft on gambling? Am I guilty of overlooking the harms of designed addiction? I don’t know, probably? Gambling is a dangerous, potentially life-destroying force. The world is full of gambling games that want to crawl into your limbic system and drain every last ounce of life-force from your soul. From the perspective of a living soul that wants to hang onto its life-force, this is a BAD THING. But the world is also full of anti-gambling counter-measures - warnings and customs and edicts and norms that want to protect your soul and keep it safe. I don’t want to be a combatant in this conflict. I want to pay attention to gambling. I want to see it, and understand it, as a thing in the world, a thing that is capable of creating beauty and meaning, as well as destroying it.

I think most people should probably just avoid gambling games. Most people should avoid hypnotic, compulsive, addictive games in general. But I also think that, if you really want to understand games, you should learn how to play these games. Which means learning how to stop playing them. You should learn how to disappear into them, how to let them swallow you whole, and then learn how to extract yourself, safely, on the other side. This is a skill you can develop, and getting good at it will not only help you safeguard your soul, it will also teach you some things about how your soul is constructed in the first place.

Is my approach “acritical”? I don’t think so. Aesthetic forms are, more than anything, realms of critical judgement, in which we seek to make fine-grained distinctions between experiences, to compare and contrast them, to articulate how and why some are better than others, to discover what we want from them, and why; a process that unfolds in the intersection between our private experiences and and our shared lives. But doing this well requires perceiving them clearly. I think that it is difficult to see games clearly. Partly because they’re complicated, multi-dimensional, experience-generating state machines, and partly because some of the common tools we use to see them are crude, and obscure and distort as much as they reveal.

What may appear, in my approach, to be a cavalier disregard for the important work of critical judgment is, instead, an attempt to set aside these common ways of looking at games, the ones that come easily to mind, that come so easily to mind we don’t even notice them. To set them aside so that we can see what we are doing, really see the games we are playing, and begin the serious work of critical judgment in earnest.