(Reader beware: Cod psychology ahead.)
The first generation of video gamers are now hitting their 40s. Middle age often heralds a stock-taking of one’s life up to this half-way point. For many men (and let’s face it, first-generation gamers are almost exclusively male) this serves to highlight that their life has fallen short of their youthful aspirations. No matter how unrealistic such goals may have been, a catalogue of perceived missed opportunities and rose-tinted regrets often results in the infamous “mid-life crisis”. This condition is usually cured by either a ridiculous fling or an even more ridiculous car. The embarrassment to all involved means crisis-avoidance is highly desirable, leaving many middle-aged men scrambling to justify the choices they’ve made, and the manner in which they’ve spent more than half their allotted time on this planet.
I think this need for justification goes some way towards explaining the recent boom in articles which explore the intrinsic “value” of video games, ranging from the age-old “games-as-art” argument, to the ethics of gaming or the examination of on-line multiplayer games as vast social experiments. This piece, however pretentious the title may be, is not one of those articles. Quite the opposite, in fact. I long-ago made my peace with the fact that video games are, for the most part, pointless. So why do I persist in playing them?
Boffins like to explain human behaviour in terms of evolutionary instincts, and there are none stronger than survival and reproduction. Any species which lacks either doesn’t last very long. Most human activities can be crudely split into those be motivated by survival (e.g., breathing, sleeping, not eating Mexican sushi) and those motivated by reproduction (e.g., grooming, working hard to buy a flash car, fighting with other men).
Playing is usually lumped into one of these categories too. Animals play as a means of determining social position within the group or developing crucial survival skills, most notably running after or away from other animals. In humans, most athletic events have their origins in abstracted demonstrations of hunting ability. Modern sports have grown out of these purer pursuits, and it’s clear that success in such endeavours still remains useful in attracting the opposite sex (the glaring disparity in sexual attractiveness of Carlos Tevez and his wife springs to mind).
Most traditional gaming can also be ascribed to testing and/or demonstrating prowess over reproductive competitors, though in a mental rather than physical capacity. But video gaming is different. While high-score tables are important to a certain subset of gamers, and some games do revolve around besting your fellow man, most video gaming simply pits man against machine. Some cold-hearted individuals may even claim that striving for success in video gaming runs counter to the reproductive instinct, but what do they know?
Others explain video gaming in terms of escapism. The desire to be the alpha male, when not achievable in real life, can be satisfied by games which cast the player as the daring hero who will get the girl and kill the baddies. A nice, but probably flawed idea: For many early arcade games, such as Space Invaders and Pacman, the story line was merely an afterthought, often discernable only from the artwork on the side of the cabinet rather than the events on-screen. The continued success of completely abstract games, such as Tetris, is the final nail in this theory’s coffin.
So the question remains: Why do we game? I’ll be buggered if I know. I enjoy it, and that (for me) is reason enough. You weren’t really expecting a proper answer, were you?
