The Value of Games

A few quick thoughts on the value of games after reading a bit on the MOMA design exhibit about functionality vs meaning etc. :

Games are art and have meaning, sure. But I think for expressing traditional forms of "meaning in art" games are basically very inferior or at best slightly inferior to the traditional forms of art themselves. If all we're looking for in complex and powerful games is literature-style heavy duty themes and character development then games are always going to lose out to books or movies or fine arts. In my opinion, games have a different kind of meaning and are most interesting when aiming for a different kind of goal. Whereas many traditional forms of art are mostly about intentional meaning -- they have a message -- games are not about anything. Maybe really bad, simple games can have the same kind of meaning we often respect in traditional art, but any good game is going to be complex enough that it becomes many times more difficult, and virtually impossible, to insert meaning in the same way you can insert a theme into a novel. But why would you even want to? Traditional art often (although not always) makes statements, but games can ask questions, and they can ask questions in a way that no other medium can. Every game is a question. It's: I wonder what would happen if I created a system in which X is true. Or, I wonder what would happen if I modeled a system in the following way. In this way, the meaning is participatory as well -- it's only uncovered through the combined efforts of the designers and the players. And even though I think that's valuable in the abstract in a lot of ways, maybe the most obvious way to see value in it is when games model real world systems (and they do pretty often). Take Civ for example. Civ is more or less trying to find an architecture to model the entire world, but in Civ IV killing slaves early game to make your cities happier is a very strong strategy. Surely Sid Meier didn't intend that as a message or a theme to be uncovered in the game. But just because it wasn't intended doesn't make it worthless. It's actually a fascinating (and disturbing) insight. It's just one of the amazing things that you can uncover when you take a system and model in and then push it to its logical extreme. And games are the only artform that can do that, really. You wind them up and you let them loose, and no one knows what they're going to say.

The other thing that makes games valuable is much simpler. Becoming an expert is valuable in and of itself in my mind, but many people would disagree. However, I think it's definitely the case that becoming good at games teaches you how to learn skills -- how to become an expert. Because unlike many other things, they have immediate feedback and are heavily goal oriented -- two things that many actual skills lack. But when you go back to learn something that's "obviously" useful, if you approach it with a goal oriented mindset, look for challenges, and seek for immediate feedback -- i.e. devote yourself to something that experts on experts (yeah) call deliberate practice -- I think it really makes you better at becoming better.