My position on gaming has changed since my early days. In the beginning, I came to love computer games as something like a sport. I was in it for the skill and competition, whether we were making coordinated infiltrations in Team Fortress, micromanaging an attack on the enemy’s economy in Starcraft, or having a showdown in Unreal Tournament. In those days, the less luck involved, and the more room for speed, wits, and improvement, the better. Today I still value those qualities and games that require them, but I no longer spend much time on the sort of games put on the shelves by big-name companies.
For one thing, I don’t identify with players who use games – or books, for that matter – as an escape. Although I wouldn’t phrase it quite so strongly, I agree with Roger Ebert’s statement about computer games: “I do not have a need ‘all the time’ to take myself away from the oppressive facts of my life, however oppressive they may be, in order to go somewhere where I have control. I need to stay here and take control.” Put another way, I see life itself as a game; and lately, the game of life has seized the reins and left little room for the video games which consume and dominate in their own right.
In some ways my life of gaming has been a progression. My first online game was Diablo, and I was completely addicted. At that time, role playing games of all sorts started becoming of interest to my brothers; for me, it was the ability to gain experience and watch a character develop in strength and abilities. By my mid-teens I wasn’t playing so many RPGs anymore; they had been replaced by Starcraft. I loved it for a more grown-up version of the same reason I had played Diablo. Instead of a character growing in abilities, in Starcraft, like chess, it was the player who developed. My later teenage years were focused almost wholly on chess itself, which seemed to offer a more ready bridge into “real life” skills like math and logic. But perhaps you can predict the destination of my journey through these games. Today, life itself is the game. Chinese, computer science, psychology and language have stepped in to supercede my diversions. Diversions, indeed! As the place of games became less diversion and more intent and focus, it was filled less by games. Today watching my program compile and operate correctly is every bit as thrilling to me as a perfectly executed Reaver drop. And no blitz to checkmate, regardless of how few seconds are on my clock, is more exciting than that conversational exchange in a language you are beginning to grasp.
The funny thing is, at this moment when games have evolved from serious hobbies to sport-like competition to life activities, I now find myself playing Tetris, or Snake – the little casual games I never touched before. It turns out they are quite effective at providing the five minute burst of color or challenge of reflexes that refreshes me between code-writing and text-book time. If I were playing Mass Effect, I would give it a minute and it would take an hour. It seems that after I’ve outgrown the grown-up games, it’s the little ones that step back in to my life.