by [name redacted]

Part ten of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation.

We play them, we critique them, sometimes we enjoy them, sometimes we make them. To what end, exactly? Outside of screwing around in search of that elusive “wheeee!”, what exactly do we mean to accomplish? Why videogames? Why do we even bother? It stands to reason that whatever keeps drawing us back to the darned things, it’s got something to do with their basic nature; something that appeals to our own.

We’ve established, at least on the basis of these silly articles of mine, that videogames are a medium of expression focused on a study of cause and effect – in particular the relationship between the player and the gameworld. And indeed, on a fundamental level our attraction to videogames seems based in curiosity: in a driving need to understand, and thereby to have some form of command over, our world.

This is the ambition that in a sense makes us what we are; that defines humanity in general and – in its shades and nuances – each of us as an individual. It is also the ambition that has plagued philosophers for millennia: how do we define this decisive, apparently free driving force? Surely it is at least related to the force that gives us life. Is curiosity an aspect of the soul? Is it our biological survival instinct? Is it natural or supernatural? Is it possible to be completely free, or are we ineluctably slave to our unseen biology and psychology and the universal web of change of which we are only an insignificant footnote? Not the easiest of questions.

Breakfast

So, none of us can function in a vacuum; we understand (indeed, are provided material to understand) through communication with our world, and the people and objects within it. That interaction, each decision we make, thereby on some incremental level changes both us and the world, providing a new set of circumstances. The collective action of six billion people, determined in part through their own inner motivation – however you choose to describe it – in majority by the circumstances and events against which they are provided to react, results in the in modern society that accounts for most of the world we are given to react to. As a result of this mess and the cosmic weirdness that set it in motion (and occasionally stops back to interfere, as New Orleans and Herculaneum can attest), we’re provided alarm clocks to wake us up, slippers to step into, toast to put into a toaster, and the domesticated housecat who we discover chose to vomit on the coffee table at four in the morning while we lay in bed unconsciously processing our past sixteen hours of poor decisions.

We exert our influence on the world in whatever small way we’re allotted – speaking rudely to the cat, pretending we didn’t see the vomit for our significant others to clean up later, going to work and spending most of our time browsing 4chan or posting to Internet forums about television shows that we never have the time to watch anymore, or going to school to be patronized by people paid way too little to say way too little in the least helpful way possible then to give us something to keep us busy so it looks like they’ve been busy when really most of their time is spent arguing about which one of them is busiest. We come home drained, frustrated, a little annoyed with this world that doesn’t seem to have been conceived with us specially in mind, and generally turn right to rebelling. For some people that means having a scotch on rocks and watching porn; for others it means going out to skateboard, or to hang out with friends upon whom you know you can exert at least some influence; for others it means writing a short story or painting a picture that you feel needs to be painted. Still others look for inspiration – new perspectives, new information to process, to feed their screaming hunger for meaning in the world.

It’s into this jumble of our own daily cause and effect and needs and wants and passions that videogames slot themselves. As expressive works, presenting alternative worlds with alternative rules and thereby alternative perspectives, they provide inspiration; as self-contained causal frameworks in the guise of alternative realities, developed specifically with the player in mind, they provide a form of relief. Here’s a world with rules you can learn, boundaries that are generally clear, where you know for a fact that everything you do in some way matters – and paradoxically where nothing matters, so in practical terms you’re free to do whatever you feel like. That is, within the focused range you’re given.

Lunch

The focus is the important element: ideally the range of action provided the player would reflect the precise range of decisionmaking suggested by the gameworld, and ideally the actions given, in the context of that gameworld and the decisions it suggests, would each be loaded with meaning significant to the player through identification with the gameworld and with the actions chosen through decisions made. On a basic level, that meaning would simply make sense of the situation: pressing “down” would move your spaceship down, to avoid the oncoming bullet. On a more sophisticated and ideal level, it would be explored and exploited for its built-in psychological potential. What emotional or intellectual consequences might result from the player’s action or inaction? What triggers might guide that action? How would comparing the triggers, the decisions made, and the effect of those decisions, affect the player, emotionally or intellectually? For any sophisticated medium, the affect on the audience – in videogames on the player, as a decisive force – should be the primary agenda of any given work. For videogames, the primary illustrative power is in showing the player what it means, in human terms, to make decisions – however narrow those terms might be.

Indeed, even as simple as videogames are in their current form – as basic and mathematical and workmanlike their use of causal representation – studies have shown an increase in the decisiveness of children who have grown up playing videogames. Supposedly the Nintendo generation has, on average, a much easier time throwing itself into unknown situations and experimenting, to see what happens – in a sense acting out the rudimentary skills rudimentarily exercised by their Turrican and their Journey to Silius. It makes sense; this is the way our brain works, and indeed the power of art: in the way its metaphorical framework exercises the subconscious parts of our brains that allow us to process information creatively, nonlinearly, to make connections between disparate concepts, to understand the world we inhabit. Get used to abstract situations where you need to experiment – often failing over and over – to find the most elegant solution to a problem, and little surprise that you’ll be more prepared to connect those situations with ones in your daily life.

Though I don’t know if it would be appropriate to say the primary function of videogames is instructional – if vaguely and indirectly so – their impact and potential as artistic works seems evident. All the more shame, then, that current games (indeed, those of the last two decades) largely seem to be missing their ideal target by focusing more on videogames as a form than as a medium; by being more concerned with familiar structures and mechanisms – metaphors that made sense at the time, in the place they were first used, for what they intended to express – than with what the current game intends to express through its causal framework, and on how best to express it to the player.

Dinner

So if we define ourselves through our actions, and videogames are a study of cause-and-effect, providing a unique and ostensibly meaningful universe upon which to act, you could say that the primary appeal in videogames lies in the opportunity they provide to assert our individuality. Likewise, the primary potential of videogames lies in the capacity to lend significance to that action, giving weight and nuance to the self-definition that we gain through our actions.

Videogames, then, would most practically seem to be about the struggle for self-determination through communication. If you like, the player is the ping and the game is the Pong; meaning occurs somewhere in between. The application of that theory to the medium, to the industry, and to the way they intersect with our individual lives is what, for a couple of semi-ironic years I have referred to as “Pongism”.

For me, Pongism started off as a sort of a joke philosophy, devised in response to what I and a few other Internet rebels saw as the academic pomposity of ludology. I figured if someone’s going to set about studying how videogames are made – in the process portraying them as a sterile, abstract maze of design theories – it made sense to create balance by studying what videogames essentially, qualitatively are; what they mean to achieve. I began with the basic premise (ping, pong = communication! Cause and effect!), then extrapolated to ridiculous degrees, drawing up Cartesian diagrams to break down genres and individual games and schools of design by abstractions of what they have to say. Oh, it was great. And it was annoying.

Still, once you start thinking of videogames in those terms – whereby the bullet from your ship in SpaceWar! is akin to an Internet ping or a telegram or a bat’s echolocation screech, or simply reaching out your hand to touch a book, and the entire purpose of reaching out is to see what happens when you do, thereby providing you new circumstances to react to – it can be kind of hard to stop. It’s heady because it’s simple and kind of obvious. And because, for whatever reason (and there are various), not everybody seems to get it – as primary and therefore important as it is.

When you realize that Pongism, being a study of causality, is also directly related to determinism, and that our own individuality is defined by the choices we make within the causal framework that define our lives, the theory takes on a scary amount of weight. It becomes something of an all-encompassing philosophy about life and the way it relates to videogames – thereby how videogames relate to life, It’s in here, I’m convinced, that we will find our aesthetic criteria. It’s here we hold the secret to reforming the game industry. Pongism is the key.

Eventually – provided the planet doesn’t get hit by a rogue comet in the next fifteen years or so, wiping out the majority of our current industrialized society – videogames will mature. They will become a significant platform for expression. For all they have to offer, that simply can’t be conveyed through other means, it’s inevitable that we’ll figure out how to harness it effectively. That’s not going to happen, though, until we start thinking about videogames on a more practical level, in terms of what purpose they serve in our broader lives and how our lives apply to what videogames fundamentally serve to accomplish – compared to all of the levels of convolution and misplaced abstraction that we’re used to distracting us. The longer we go on dwelling about existing forms, and our existing expectations for the medium, the more time we waste on, what is ultimately, a losing battle.

That sounds awfully boring to me.