In Defense of Play

The blog is out there, and with it comes mail! Several of you, either in the postings at Slashdot or through personal mail seemed to be asking 'What's the big deal about games, anyway?' (paraphrase is mine, but I think fairly accurate). And the argument is that games are just that: games. Little wastes of time. More than one reader went further to say that games are in fact a drag on the whole of society, that their escapist nature in fact keeps people from being more productive members of society.

Well. First off, you'll get no argument from me that games are escapist. They are. You will, however get argument from me that they don't teach anything. I am involved in two projects that use games and multi-user play-spaces in formal education. These are the Jumping Genes project with the Cornell Theory Center that uses virtual worlds technology to get students together and a game system to help students learn high-school biology (funded by the National Science Foundation, thank you government). The second is the MUPPETS project, which aims at improving the freshman programming experience within the Information Technology program at RIT.

There are also countless websites that document young people finding out more about history or reading books to augment their knowledge about a particular game / time period. They may be good at teaching things like logic and pattern recognition, basic math and spatial orientation. We don't know because no one has studied it (although more and more projects are being proposed. I am also way-overphasizing with the phrase 'no one' as there is a lot of good research there, just not nearly enough). About the only thing I've seen proven is that gaming in children can produce better hand-eye coordination in certain types of specialized situations.

I remember reading 'Gilgamesh' about the same time I was playing 'Bard's Tale' and found more than one connection between the two. I was interested in the Arthurian legend after I was introduced to it in Disney's 'The Sword in the Stone'. [Yes, that was a horrid introduction.] But I found, and read, Le Morte De Arthur by the 5th grade. I got in a fight with my high school English teacher who told me that T. H. White's The Once and Future King was the first recorded version of the tale. And I was already playing Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Might & Magic, and several other RPG's during this time, and recording the parallels between games and between games and fantasy literature, past and present.

All of that was escapist. But I learned how to read and write, how to analyze, how to understand literary reference and derivative work in spite of, not because of, my public education. And I am not alone in that regard. The stereotype that gamers are all an illiterate group of c00l d3wdS just doesn't quite work when you run around a game world and meet Grendel in character (one of my earliest memories of Everquest, about two weeks after launch).

That's not to say there aren't many who fall in to the stereotypical category of slack-jawed 14-hour-a-day addict. It happens, and it shouldn't. But to say this is 'the fault of games' is not entirely true. This happens to people with television. This happens to people with drugs. This happens to people with nearly anything in excess. I have yet to see a multi-conglomerate media company walk into a home in the suburbs of the US and physically chain a child to a gaming console. So I assume they are free to do what they want. And yet my readers were correct, some of them (though not all, and let's not mince words, no one seems to have any really solid research on exact numbers) fall directly into a very dangerous play-pattern.

But let's explore an interesting idea that I was discussing with some friends the other day (my friends are parents, I am not). It seems to me that one of the reasons that our children are "wasting" so much of their lives in virtual game-worlds is because we are not providing other things for them to do. I mean that very seriously. In my community, sports teams are limited in number, with thousands of students attending a single high-school. Unless you are very very good at a sport, you won't make the team.

When I grew up, I hung out every summer at a neighborhood pool - but they don't have those any more because of the cost of insurance for such an establishment. I also hung out at a pizza place around the corner from my school, but they tore that down because the drug-dealers started going there to sell their stuff to the students. The community I grew up in had a 9pm curfew that no one under 18 should be out past then without a parent, and many towns and villages are resorting to this kind of thing to prevent 'unwanted activity'. You can't be in a public park after dark either.

Children don't go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the "traditional" past-times of children and replaced them with television [first - pre 1985] and games [second - post 1985]. And we (the older community) have made little to no effort to understand games, only shoved our children in front of them and said 'don't bother me'. Is it any wonder that there are now mini-vans with game consoles built into the back seat? I haven't seen a solid response as to what, exactly, our children are supposed to be doing, just "not those games".

Because much of society doesn't want to get involved with games or understand them, very few parents actually understand the rating system. They assume, wrongly, that if something is a game, then it must be ok for children. This could be because the stereotype of the very word 'game' implies that it is for kids - but only in our society: we do not think of Go-Mo-Ku being only for children, in fact the image that is conjured into my mind is one of tribal elders playing on the temple steps. When did 'game' get reduced to 'Shoots & Ladders' ? (Go Mo Ku originated in China some 4000 years ago and is, I think, the earliest known 'game'... fascinating that so many of us regard the escape of gaming as 'new').

My friend Liz is an exception - she plays the first few rounds of games with her boys, and thus understands what they are doing with their time. She also helps them monitor their day - making sure they don't 'just sit there and game all day'. Then again, despite her protests, Liz is a gamer too, just take one look at her Palm Pilot. She may not subscribe to the male-dominated war game scenarios, but she does enjoy games along a fairly classic pattern of puzzle solving and timed strategy, from Magic: the Gathering to Pokemon. (and Animal Crossing, which I haven't figured out yet).

But it seems a lot of our society is perfectly willing to abdicate responsibility for our offspring for large periods of time, and then scream that we don't understand their culture. Gaming-culture is infused with this anti-mainstream and anti-establishment ethos, because it springs in part from the desire to not fit in with the cultural norms of our larger society that have been, in part, denied the gamer for whatever reason.

There is a fundamental emotion that makes us (as adults) angry at games. That emotion is fear. You can see this fear reflected in Henry Jenkins experiences with the US Congress. You can see that fear in court rulings that circumvent the First Amendment. All because no one is willing to do what my parents did - sit down and play some of the games with their children and understand them, make intelligent decisions, and enforce parental oversight.

I'm sure I'll get some hate-mail here. I am not denying horrible acts like the virtual rape that occured here. I am denying that that is the part and parcel of games as culture. When I was at the GDC there was someone (and I'm very sorry I don't remember who) who said "As with every other medium, the first forays into the medium concentrated on violence. Violence is easy, and it always appeals to something in mankind. We are already seeing games that rise above violence as their major component. Hopefully, there will eventually be all manner of games, just as there are all manner of films, some of which are violent and mindless, but some of which are beautiful and soft." Don't believe the part about violence in mankind? Re-read Gilgamesh.

The thing that is very very dangerous is the idea that somehow games are escapist and should therefore be cut-off. Escapism is nothing new to society. Stories are escapist. Movies are escapist. In fact, if we want to be technical, plays are escapist and by extension the so-called pinnacle of human literary expression, William Shakespeare, is escapist [regardless of who you think actually wrote them, I'm sticking with convention and calling them "his" plays].

We make great strides to understand the nuance of drama, Shakespeare, art, creative writing, etc. but when I go to meeting on campus and introduce myself I sometimes get 'oh, you are that gaming guy' and the eyes glaze over in the assumption I will have nothing interesting to say. (Interestingly, this also happens in some technical circles, but that is changing more rapidly as at least the technology of games is being recognized, if not their content).

I could argue that Missile Command is a telling tale of the fear of a collective society in a Cold War trying to cope with a threat of nuclear Armageddon, that young people flocked to arcades to have some outlet for the anger at not having a future other than as disassociated sub-atomic particles. But instead, we argue that games are somehow different, more vile, and less worthy of our attention.

Society has always had escapism - it is a necessary and integral part of any human society (go look at societies that have tried to suppress it... you may not like the result). You can see this in the jousting tourneys of England, professional sport, the bardic tales of pre-recorded history, the original Olympiad, The Golden Age of Hollywood, etc. [Interested readers might want to check out Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Murray as an interesting look at the parallels in literary work with modern day muds and games]. In our present day culture, we have more time devoted to leisure as a whole, and so to me it is not suprising that we spend more time inworld... we are not out hunting and gathering all day to feed the tribe. If we disapprove of our children spending time online, what are their alternatives?

Oh, and by the way, the average age of electronic game players across all genres is 28.