Games have always been serious business.
Like stories, we have a tendency to treat games as frivolous. And yet, like sports, we somehow find ourselves in a society where pro gamers are paid millions by sponsors and tournament organizers. Where game creators attain rockstar status, and where rockstars skip shows to play their favorite games. If capitalism is about letting markets reflect what society values, then society really, really, values games.
This isn’t something completely anomalous to our time. My grandfather was a Go enthusiast and could recall epic matches between grandmasters that he followed closely in the paper. During the Cold War, the chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky was intensely followed on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Little wonder that Chess is considered the game of kings. Knucklebones and dice get dug up by archaeologists in all corners of the Roman Empire. We even have Sumerian board games from tombs dating back to 2600 BCE whose rules have been lost to time. It’s no secret that we love games and always have.
What’s odd is how much more intense games have gotten and how our paradigms for fun have to shift as a result.
Games—More Challenging Than Life
Some argue that we love games because they let us inhabit power fantasies. While much of the premise of alien-murdering-machismo surrounding a game like Doom Eternal would suggest that, I don’t think it’s exactly right. If the game were a true power fantasy, the player would have limitless ammo and infinite health, commonly referred to by gamers as “god mode”. But few people actually want to beat a game on god mode. They want hours of unexpected surprises and grueling puzzles to solve. We don’t want to be gods for whom life holds few consequences, we want to be heroes whose labors and tragedies are worthy of epic poetry.
Games by definition must have rules. As analog games can only contain as many rules as fit in our heads, they must be basic abstractions of the world at best. Videogames make it so that the computer can handle millions of the rules of the world—everything from the laws of physics to lighting—for you. This allows videogames to achieve a much closer approximation to reality, leaving you to worry only about the rules that directly affect your choices. Then, in order to maximize fun, the game subtly sets up your expectations so that you can’t make choices that ruin the shared fantasy, e.g. the demon you’re about to shoot in the face won’t suddenly start pleading with you about its wife and kids or turn into an adorable puppy or display the kind of gore that drives real soldiers insane.
Not only do great games shield you from real-life depravity, but they also push you away from real-life monotony. Doom Eternal is famous for its “push-forward” gameplay, which rewards you for taking bold actions, switching weapons mid-combat, and coming up with creative and exhilarating ways to engage with its world.
In other words, a game designer’s job isn’t to let you do everything you want, nor is it to reaffirm your every move with eye candy and gold stickers. Instead, they are tasked with finding the perfect blend of choice, realism, and challenge that registers with players as rewarding gameplay, aka “fun”.
What Makes Life Not Fun: A Paradox of Stakes
However, I’m not convinced that “lack of better designers” is the sole reason why we aren’t as successful at life as we are at games. After all, while much effort was put into making Doom Eternal fun for everyone, many professional reviewers still complained about how hard it was. Some even dared to call it boring. This suggests that it doesn’t matter how much thought creators put into making their worlds fun. If it gets inhabited by sentient beings, then some of those will gripe about how much their life in it sucks. We all share this attitude to some degree when it comes to real-life. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be playing videogames or losing ourselves in Bridgerton.
I believe what holds us back more than anything else, are stakes. The problem is that we want to care about what we’re doing while at the same time not caring if we fail.
In games, the stakes are often impossibly high. You don’t just remove a piece, you capture or devour it. You aren’t crushing a presentation, you’re literally crushing hellspawn. And without you, all is doomed. Thus, everyone is constantly talking about how awesome you are. And yet, you know that if you actually die, you can always come back and nobody knows how badly you fared the last time.
In real life, the stakes are pathetically low. Nobody really cares if you do your homework. At best a few hundred people might know about how you “killed” your last assignment. And if you fail, not only do you not get a redo, but you’ll probably just get replaced by someone more willing to do your job for less money.
Why Gamification Doesn’t Work
As Ian Bogost so aptly put it, the trend of adding stars, songs, or points to life’s unpleasant tasks to “increase the fun” is like trying to make broccoli more appetizing by dipping it in chocolate. If you don’t affect a task’s stakes, you’re not really affecting its “fun”.
To really alter how much fun life is, we need to adjust our stakes. Be clear about what we want, chart a path that becomes gradually more challenging for us over time, and set genuinely enjoyable rewards for our efforts. Most importantly, we need to be honest with ourselves about what we can realistically accomplish and why those accomplishments are significant.
In short, a fun life requires us to become our own game designers.
Next week in Part 3: We unpack what great game designers—and Zen masters—can teach us about making life more fun.
Thanks for making me think of gaming differently. Also, thanks for articulating this: "In real life, the stakes are pathetically low. Nobody really cares if you do your homework.… And if you fail, not only do you not get a redo, but you’ll probably just get replaced by someone more willing to do your job for less money."