Why do you play games?

In the first post of this year, I want to share some content from the book I’m reading at the moment: Playing smart - on games, intelligence, and artificial intelligence by Julius Togelius. The author discusses many aspects on how games challenge us and what we can expect from games that use artificial intelligence in the near future.



One of the first points discussed by Togelius is about the question I already brought many times in this site: why do we play games? It’s not easy to answer (and we have many different views for this subject) but I think it’s essential to gather multiple points of view to create a more solid opinion.

Togelius launches the question: why do you play games? And starts his answer with a very interesting argument that most of the time we are playing games for many reasons but all the time – despite the game we are playing – we are doing an exercise of intense planning.

Below, I want to share this excellent content from his book and recommend the reading for all the followers of this site:

Why do you play games? To relax, have a good time, lose yourself a bit? Perhaps as a way of socializing with friends? Almost certainly not as some sort of brain exercise. But let’s look at what you are really doing: You plan. In Chess, you are planning for your victory by imagining a sequence of several moves that you will take to reach checkmate, or at least capture one of your opponent’s pieces. If you are any good, you are also taking your opponent’s countermoves into account and making contingency plans if they do not fall into your elaborately laid traps. In Super Mario Bros., you are planning wheter to take the higher path, which brings more reward but is riskier, or the safer lower path. You are also planning to venture down that pipe that might bring you to a hidden treasure chamber, or to continue past it, depending on how much time you have left and how eager you are to finish the level. You may be planning to eat the power-up that lets you get through that wall so you can lick a switch that releases a bean from which you can grow a beanstalk that lets you climb up to that cloud you want to get to. In Angry Birds you are planning where to throw each bird so as to achieve maximum destruction with the fewest birds. If you crush the ice wall with the blue bird, you can then hit that cavity with the black bomb bird, collapsing the main structure, and finish off that cowardly hiding pig with your red bird. (TOGELIUS, 2019, kindle edition – position 412)

#GoGamers

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Reference:

TOGELIUS, Julius. Playing smart - on games, intelligence, and artificial intelligence. London: The MIT Press, 2019.

The art of making friendly enemies

I participate in a group called Board Game Tuesday (or BGT). We meet weekly to play and discuss board games. Our primary focus is the playing, but we always set aside a time to analyze the structure of the games (mechanics, dynamics, art, components etc.).

However, I quite like to analyze the behavior of players during matches. I like to observe the nervousness to roll the dice for something important, the glory in the eyes of a player with a well-structured combo of cards, the malignant partnerships between players and – of course – arguments and "fights" because of the final results of a gaming experience.


(Playing ISLA DORADA. Big, Vince & Snow. Pic: Estevão)

This last feature, particularly, impresses me. The “magic circle” of a game has the power to transform friends in enemies with established social rules (and gaming rules). As Juul says (2013, p.11) “when playing a game, a number of actions that would regularly be awkward and rude are recast as pleasant and sociable”. So, we can say that a game can generate a kind of friendly enemies during the time of a match.

About this context Juul (2013, p.14) also says that, to play a game is “to make an emotional gamble: we invest time and self-esteem in the hopes that it will pay off. Players are not willing to run the same amount of risk – some even prefer not to run a risk at all, not to play”.

The gaming ecosystem is a complex and privileged field of studies. But we must never forget that behind a game there are human players full of feelings and this is an important part of the experience to observe, analyze and discuss.

At this moment, I’m reading again Jesper Juul’s “The Art of Failure” and Bernad Suits “The Grasshopper”. I’m full of new ideas about the role of the player inside the gaming universe and I count on this inspiration for a “wave” of posts with this subject this semester.

Keep your radars alert for that.

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Reference:

JUUL, Jesper. The Art of Failure: an essay on the pain of playing video games. Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 2013.

SUITS, Bernard. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. EUA: Broadview Press, 2005.