Memories are made of this

Let me start by saying this.

I am not a casual gamer; my levels of digital onanism don't extend to the anal pleasure of brain training, or the cyber pets that have made some handheld platforms into overpriced tamogatchi.

I am, however, a lazy, lapsed gamer. I don't play many games much, and usually months or years after all the cool kids have been there, done that, and eaten the walk-through.

With that in mind, of the games I lay claim to having played when I was a serious gamer (in my day, we didn’t have hardcore gamers), foremost is the Quake series. Doom 2, Duke Nukem, Diablo 2 had their pleasures, but Quake, particularly Quake 2, held a special place in my gaming love.

I was one of the nerdy kids; all deathmatching LAN and no hint of élan, so my experience of Quake 2 was less about the single player, and more about fragging my comrades, or, more often, getting a rocket enema. There was one particular floating-in-space-style map, Q2DM4, which saw me blasted of the edge into oblivion more times than I could count.

Although the thought of revisiting that map does make me drift off a little, this isn’t just a random nostalgia trip; there is actually a point somewhere in the middle distance of my meandering prose.

I have, on occasion, bemoaned the state of recent FPS’s, or at least justified my lack of playing them, by referencing the fact that they don’t move me like Quake did. Whilst this is (mostly) true, reflection is a glorious thing.

The emotions of the time and excitement of what was then a beautiful game are rarely replicated, and probably never will be for me in the way that sustained the many hours Q2 did. It is this context, placed alongside recent articles regarding the role of the story in videogames, that has brought me to a critical realisation.

There are two factors that make a game for me. They engage me, draw me in like the ‘emergent story’ my fellow monkey is so scathing of is supposed to, and they make a game special.

Thing is, neither of them are part of the game.

The first is the story it lets you tell. Whether it’s a 2-minute vignette featuring Fulgore crushing Cinder in Killer Instinct or the injury-ravaged season of P. Withe in the original Football Manager, a game that is well designed will allow you scope to imagine backstory and imply depths that were never considered by the designers. I am happy to leave further exposition of this aspect to the reader, in favour of what follows.

The second, and this is the part that will have you reaching for the in-flight sick bag, is the social and emotional context you give the game when you play it.

I was talking to a fellow (looks around nervously) MMORPGer  recently, and they were concerned with what their character would need at level seventy-billion, so they could make informed choices at the giddy heights of level five. A good game gives you this choice, but a good game-player knows when to forget the metagamey min-maxing, and just grows their character. This point, which will forever keep me apart from many of my peers, is probably the critical point in deciding whether a game is ‘good’. It lets me tell the story of my character, unique (at least for me) against the backdrop of the games own, usually fairly formulaic storyline. The better the player, and I am not suggesting that I am a particularly good player, just one who gets this basic tenet, the greater the player’s ability to be a part of their new shiny gameplay experience when they purchase Final Fantasy XXVII, Gran Turismo 8, or Ton Clancy’s Modern Rainbow Conquer whatever that series is called.

It’s not the game, it’s not the code, or scripting, it isn’t the platform or graphics card or storyline. It’s you, as the player, who most dictates how much fun you have, and whether you need a game to pretty much hand you all the character development along with a walkthrough and a hand to hold, or are capable of the relevant cognitive processes needed to interact with your interactive entertainment.

Example (for those not yet convinced, but still reading for some unfathomable reason).

Guitar Hero & Rockband: No plot to speak of, just escapism. You use your mind to pretend you are more than a sap with a toy guitar/microphone/banjo/whatever. You create a rocking-out character, and mentally fill in the backstory and blanks, or you sit there clicking away like a dulled simulacrum of humanity.

So the next time someone mentions emergent gameplay, or bemoans the number of people buying new game XYZ, and criticises its lack of storytelling element ABC, remember; interactive gameplay makes a demand on the player. If you aren’t up to the task, then you’re probably playing the wrong game.