24/12/2019 6.00pm
A common claim is that games are a waste of time and teach you nothing.
Let’s question that frame.
I would like to invite you, the reader, to consider games as a way of understanding and appreciating the concept of lightness and weight of our lives, by reflecting on reversibility in games, hardcore games and life hacks.
Reversibility in Games
Most games are light. In Pokemon, a pet-battling game, when you lose a battle, you cough up a few coins, run to the Pokemon Center, and you’re good as gravy in a few seconds.
You’re not held responsible when your Pokemon faint. They don’t actually die, you just run to the Pokemon Center and nurse them.
In World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game, when you die, you become a ghost who searches for their body to repossess. If you can’t find your body, you can resurrect yourself at a Spirit Healer for a total of 10 minutes penalty. But your character is still your character. Nothing’s changed about them. You can have another try at the raid.
Heaviness in Games
Recently, I’ve been playing games that are heavier. Hardcore games. Games that encourage you to play with weight. Rimworld, a colony simulator, calls itself a “story generator” instead of a game.
In Rimworld, you crash-land on a rimworld with little to no resources, and your only goal is to survive. You effectively are the dictator of a small colony and can give them orders to accomplish, and resources to build. The game throws increasingly difficult challenges at you.
The game creator encourages you not to re-load your game, so you can feel the loss. There is an option you can tick, Hardcore Mode, to prevent you from doing so. (Tynan claims that this was the way the game was meant to be played.)
Yes. You are. How attached are you really if you can bring back your favourites from the dead? Can you really say you care about them when you’re gambling with their lives?
I started out as a save scummer. I was the worst save scummer. I reloaded saves for failed surgeries, failed raids, lost limbs, friendly fire, I used just about every excuse.
And then I stopped.
My enjoyment of the game has increased tenfold. Decisions have meaning, failures have consequences.
Mehni on Reddit re: save scumming on Reddit
Nonetheless, we still impose the challenge upon ourselves. Your characters may die, but you may ‘use every excuse’ to save them. Again and again. No one forces you to play hardcore.
Falling Into the Breach
One step further down this hole of challenge is the game Into the Breach. In Into the Breach, you take on the role of a time travelling commander who leads his pilots and mechs into battle against the Vek (an insectoid enemy) across multiple timelines.
You commandeer pilots and mechs. However, deaths of your pilots are permanent, and after you’ve lost, you can only bring one pilot of three to a separate timeline. The game itself is in the genre of Roguelite — which means each run largely stands for itself, and crucially, there is no ability to save your progress and revert.
Funnily enough, time travel is precisely tempting because we’d be able to repeat our decision trees and take different roads, as explained wonderfully by Cameron Kunzelman at Vice. Consider Edge of Tomorrow, where Tom Cruise gets multiple chances to die in an alien war and learn from his mistakes in a Groundhog Day type scenario.
But eventually, because I am me and because this game is hard and because I’m just not very good at it and because I am impatient and because I just have not died, lived, died, repeated enough, I lose the game.
My Rift Walkers make the leap back in time. I get to make my choice about who gets to make the jump to another timeline to try again in these, the last days of humanity. I get to choose who becomes the beacon of hope for some other people, in a different world, and I make the hard choice between Ralph, a max-level combatant who I have drug through multiple timelines, and Amelia, this fresh face who is still making her way up the ladder.
Amelia comes with me, of course. She’s good at the game, and she’d developing great skills. Ralph gets left. Humanity gets wiped out, or at least the survivors are so spread out and harried by the Vek that it they might as well be. There’s a guilt that comes with it, and it’s a guilt that Into The Breach pushes heavily. You’re not starting over. You’re jumping over into a new realm of probability.
“‘Into the Breach’ Is About Abandoning the People You’re Supposed to Protect”, Cameron Kunzelman
This tension between time travel as ‘starting over’ and having to leave behind the survivors, creating a true sense of loss and mourning. People generate stories about their characters precisely because they matter — a parallel to Rimworld. The Pokemon community invented Nuzlocke Mode, where you are encouraged to name your Pokemon and store them in a box as if they’ve died if they have fainted in battle — just to up the ante.
Cheat Codes and Life Hacks
Consider the parallel between cheat codes in games and life hacks. Perhaps cheat codes and the way games enable (and even encourage) practices such as save-scumming have let us off too easily.
We try for easy money. We try to get rich quick, become a software engineer in 14 days. Our desire to make things better leads us to try and take shortcuts… and fall into Ponzi schemes, overpaying for courses.
The pendulum swings back the other way. What enables a genuine interest in the outcome of the game is the effort you had to put in to maintain the state. Effort is time. Effort can be unfun. But effort is what gives the game meaning and weight.
Difficulty and Flow
What of difficulty? Difficulty tells us we’re in the right place at the right time. The concept of flow, as pioneered by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It speaks to the importance of balancing difficulty and ease to create a state of flow.
We should restrict ourselves to victories that are earned to combat the triangle of boredom. Potentially, then, joy and meaning is discovered and uncovered in the striving and adoption of responsibility. If we could dream any dream we wanted to — that would devolve the meaning of it all. We’d want… a surprise.
So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream…
But (then you’d eventually say) now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it’s gonna be.”
Alan Watts — The Dream of Life
Easy Victories, Lightness and Weight
Easy victories are the dopamine hits of life. Ordering a dessert at the end of the meal. Choosing the now over the later by procrastinating. (If you wish to read more about this from a behavioral economics perspective, you may read about time preferences.)
We must emerge from the hideous and tantalizing dream world where configurations can be tweaked and tested and statistics can be maximized. Otherwise, we may take our lives ever too lightly. Wasting time.
Lightness and Weight is one of the key themes of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Instead of considering our lives lightly, where every decision is of no consequence we should think of our choices as having immense weight — Nietzsche’s thought experiment of eternal recurrence.
“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!’
“Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life?”
Aphorism 341, The Greatest Weight, The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche
Understanding The Desire for Return
The desire to travel back in time comes from a desire to live a light life. To be able to choose over and over again at the same cross-roads. To be able to test again and again, how we speak to the ones we love, how we speak to the ones we’d like to love, how we live and work.
But our choices do have costs. They burn branches and create path dependency. Life is a great game, but its much more like Into the Breach than Pokemon. Our job is then to minimize the cost of testing different paths, then be convicted on the path we’re on, because it really is the one shot we have. Ironically, this is something that I notice highlighted moreso through the lens of video games than the lens of the everyday.