October 19, 2023 On Games Real Play By Devon Brody Autumn, Sims 2. Courtesy of Lucie-Bluebird Lexington. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. I played The Sims a lot as a preteen. It was the only computer game I ever liked that didn’t involve horses, and it lived at my dad’s house, where screen time was not limited. My friend Diana had it, too, and she and I played together sometimes, in the small office connected to her parents’ bedroom. Diana liked the design element of the game, and would use cheat codes to make her Sims very rich, then build them big houses. She chose balconies with glass railings, and reupholstered her Sims’ furniture. That part was not interesting to me. My Sims were not allowed to use cheat codes. Instead, they had to succeed within the terms of my own life, or what I imagined it would be as an adult: they had to get jobs, learn skills, and build relationships. They spent time learning to cook, mostly by reading the cookbooks on their bookshelves. They paid bills that arrived in the mailbox, and redid their kitchen floors only if they made the money on their own. Everyone got a smoke detector, and I worked hard to help them keep their Need meters—Hunger, Bladder, Social, Fun, Energy, Hygiene, Comfort, Environment—in the green. If not given instructions, Sims will do their best to handle these needs themselves, electing to use the bathroom or play on the computer. But I liked to do it for them, sending them to the fridge if they were hungry, to bed if they were tired, and to another Sim if they were lonely. Read More
October 19, 2023 On Games I’m High on World of Warcraft By Patrick McGraw The city of Thunder Bluff in World of Warcraft. Screenshot from the game. It was about four in the morning when the warrior decided to leave our group. He’d started weeping, apparently, into his mic. I didn’t have a headset, but the other members of the group did, and they detailed the player’s breakdown in the chat. He couldn’t take the pressure, they said. He was sorry. He’d let us down. He was tired. He was blubbering now. He left the group and opened a portal to Stormwind, his home city. The rest of us waited a few minutes, trying to think of a way to replace the most important member of the group before giving up, surrendering the hours we’d spent working our way through Uldaman, a subterranean dungeon filled with cursed Dwarves. I stood up and took two steps away from the computer to lie down in bed and stare red-eyed at my character on the screen, which was now lit by the late-summer sun breaking through the bedsheets nailed vaguely across my windows. I think about World of Warcraft nearly every day, but considering the millions of people who play the game, I’m not alone. Launched in 2004, WoW is the most successful MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) ever. At the height of its popularity, in 2010, the game had more than twelve million active subscribers and continues to be the most played MMORPG today, almost two decades after its release. The game is so well populated that whole books have been written on the game’s sociological aspects and in-game economy. The objective of the game, if you could say there is a single objective, is to increase your character’s level. You do this by completing quests, raiding dungeons, and fighting in player-versus-player (PvP) combat, as well as engaging in the literally hundreds of other tasks and story lines the game contains, all of it taking place within the vast world of Azeroth, with each player’s character being a combination of a race (orc, troll, night elf, et cetera) and a class (shaman, mage, warrior, et cetera). Read More
October 16, 2023 On Games We’re More Ghosts Than People By Hanif Abdurraqib Screenshot from Red Dead Redemption 2. I don’t find myself investing much in the kingdom of heaven. It has always been this way for me, even as a child. I prayed often, sometimes the requisite five times a day in my Muslim household. But I did it out of a sense of duty to my living, not what might exist after my living. I can’t control my own arrival to whatever the promised land may or may not be, because I don’t have the rubric in front of me. I have sometimes been a good person who does bad things, and sometimes I’ve been a bad person who does good things. The way the afterlife is most often discussed is by way of a scale that sorts into binary categories. I grew up with Muslims who insisted that every bit of food left on their plate after a meal would be weighed against them on the day of judgment. I considered this: arriving in front of the robed choir, a few grains of rice tipping the scale toward an irreconcilable level of bad, banishing me to some fiery underworld. Read More
June 22, 2017 On Games When Lore Bores By Oliver Lee Bateman Video-game developers continue to search for the golden ratio of game play to storytelling. Still from Day of the Tentacle Remastered, an updated version of the 1993 game. My first video-gaming memories are clouded by Amnesia. That game, which comprised nothing more than white text on a black background, haunted me for years. My father bought it for the PC because he saw it on sale at Sears, brought it home, installed it via the command prompt, and then abandoned it. My brother had no use for it, either. They both played Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 3.0, for which we had purchased a joystick, and Tetris, which appeared on the home computer long before its popularity exploded on Nintendo’s handheld Game Boy. Tetris and Flight Simulator were “real” games, you see. Push the buttons in a skillful way and you would win. You could trump your high score or perfect your landing at Meigs Field. But Amnesia was just a story, a playable story, and from a game-play standpoint it wasn’t even a particularly good one. Like most text-based games, it relied on commands like “eat pizza” (always a favorite of mine) to advance the plot, and like most poor text-based games, it didn’t recognize many of the commands that the player typed. Read More
January 7, 2016 On Games Ready Player None By Michael Thomsen Talking to Jonathan Blow about his new game, The Witness. From The Witness. “Don’t print this,” Jonathan Blow tells me. I’ve just asked him how his game The Witness is going to end, having spent an hour playing it alone at the Bryant Park Hotel—in a suite I’d discovered was actually Blow’s personal room when I got a glass of water. He’d gone to the lobby so I wouldn’t feel like I was being watched as I played. I felt immediately conscious of being in someone else’s space as I stepped through the bedroom to reach the bathroom sink. The bed was still unmade; a small bag sat agape on a chair beside a pile of clothes in the corner. Blow’s games excel at making one conscious of these things: of being in someone else’s territory, at once intimate and opaque. Like unknowingly stepping into someone’s bedroom, it’s natural, when you play his games, to want to make sure you can find your way back out again, even as you think about going further in. Blow is the designer of two commercial games—2008’s Braid and now The Witness, due out later this month—and he’s as much a point of fascination as his creations. A 2012 profile in The Atlantic by Taylor Clark called him “the most dangerous gamer.” Though Braid added, by his own admission, “a lot of zeroes” to his bank account, he lives in a largely unfurnished apartment in Oakland, displaying what Clark described as “a total indifference toward the material fruits of wealth.” His longtime friend and programmer, Chris Hecker, told Clark, “You have to approach Jon on Jon’s terms. It’s not ‘Let’s go out and have fun.’ It’s more like ‘Let’s discuss this topic,’ or ‘Let’s work on our games.’ You don’t ask Jon to hang out, because he’ll just say ‘Why?’ ” Read More
March 25, 2015 On Games It’s-A-Me, Ishmael By Ted Trautman Can Nintendo tell a proper story? From The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Nintendo and Netflix may be developing a Legend of Zelda TV series, the Wall Street Journal recently reported; or, as Time reported even more recently, they may not. Behind the will-they-or-won’t-they speculation lies a more complicated question: Can they? Do games like these bear expansion into full-fledged stories? At first glance, a Zelda series seems like a savvy move: HBO’s Game of Thrones has proven that there’s high demand for vaguely medieval fantasies, of which Zelda—a franchise that made its debut in 1986, and that’s grown to include roughly seventeen games—is a prime specimen. And since Nintendo has gradually been losing its share of the video-game market for the past fifteen years, it has every reason to find other ways to wring more value from its globally recognizable intellectual property. But games don’t translate as easily to TV or film as you might think. In his 2010 apologia Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, perhaps the most thorough defense to date of video games as art, the journalist and essayist Tom Bissell explains why: “The video-game form,” he writes, “is incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative progression.” Unlike books and films, games require challenge, “which frustrates the passing of time and impedes narrative progression.” Read More