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Stephen Downes brought my attention to a post on the website LessWrong, which, as he points out, is a prime (and increasingly rare case) of the comments section being more interesting than the main content itself.

One of the commentators brings up the work of David Golumbia who passed away a couple of years ago. Golumbia wrote an article which questioned what gamers are doing when they’re gaming, especially with role-playing games (RPGs) and first-person shooters (FPS).

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously pointed out how difficult it is to define what a ‘game’ is. Many things can be games or game-like, but trying to neatly categorise what makes them so is seemingly impossible. Do games have to be competitive? No. Do games have to be fun? Well… no. And so on.

There’s a lot to think about in the Golumbia article, and (for once!) I’m going to set aside the very pointed critique of the capitalist element and the power dynamic. Instead, I’ll excerpt the part about games providing “the human pleasure taken in the completing of activities with closure and with hierarchical means of task measurement.”

For me, personally, most of my gaming sessions are usually with and/or against other human players. For example, on a Sunday night, my gaming crew is enjoying Payday 3 a game about robbing, stealing, and looting. There are aims and objectives, and tasks to complete and check off. It’s satisfying. Now I know why.

If we cast aside for a moment the generic distinction according to which programs like WoW, Halo, and Half Life are games while Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop are “productivity tools,” it becomes clear that the applications have nearly as much in common as makes them distinct. Each involves a wide range of simulations of activities that can or cannot be directly carried out in physical reality; each demands absorptive, repetitive, hierarchical tasks as well as providing means for automating and systematizing them. Each provides distinct and palpable feelings of pleasure for users in any number of different ways; this pleasure is often of a type relating to some kind of algorithmic completeness, a “snapping” sense that one has completed, with digital certainty, a task whose form may or may not have been made clear from the outset (finishing a particular spreadsheet or document, completing a design, or finishing a quest or mission). In every context in which these activities are completed, whether that context is established by the computer or by people in the physical world, there is indeed some sense of “experience” having been gained, listed, compiled by the completion of a given task. Arguably, this is a distinctive feature of the computing infrastructure: not that tasks were not completed before computers (far from it) but rather that the digitally-certain sense of having completed a task in a closed way has become heightened and magnified by the binary nature of computers.

What emerges as a hidden truth of computer gaming — and no less, although it may be even better hidden, of other computer program use — is the human pleasure taken in the completing of activities with closure and with hierarchical means of task measurement. Again, this kind of pleasure certainly existed before computers, but it has become an overriding emotional experience for many in society only with the widespread use of computers. A great deal of the pleasure users get from WoW or Half Life, as from Excel or Photoshop, is a digital sense of task completion and measurable accomplishment, even if that accomplishment only roughly translates into what we may otherwise consider intellectual, physical, or social goal-attainment. What separates WoW or Half Life from the worker’s business world is thus not variability or “give” but rational certainty, the discreteness of goals, the general sense that such goals are well-bounded, easily attainable, and satisfying to achieve, even if the only true outcome of such attainment is the deferred pursuit of additional goals of a similar kind.

[…]

At the very least, WoW and Half Life, and their cohort are therefore not games in the sense to which we have become accustomed. It seems clear that we call these programs “games” because of the intense feelings of pleasure experienced by players when we engage with them and because they appear on the surface not to be involved in the manipulation of objects with physical-world consequences. On reflection, neither of these facts proves very much… And the fact that computer games are pleasurable cannot, by itself, furnish grounds for calling them games: after all, games constitute only a part of those activities in the world that give us pleasure.

[…]

Can there be any doubt about the potential attractiveness of an apparently human world in which we understand clearly how to attain power, what to do with it, and that the rules by which we operate do not change or change only by explicit order? The deep question such games raise is what happens when people bring expectations formed by them into the world outside.

Source: Golumbia, D. (2013). ‘Games Without Play’. New Literary History, Vol. 40, No. 1, Play (Winter, 2009), pp. 179-204. Available at: https://diglit.community.uaf.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/511/2015/01/Games_without_Play.pdf

Image: ELLA DON