I’m always wondering why am I constantly going back to play some music instead of playing games. I have dozens of them on Steam, waiting for me, I have MinefuckingCraft, emulators with plenty, thousands of web games out there… But all I can do is grab my bass, my guitar or sit in front of my keyboard and play, toy, learn. This slide helped me to understand that.
Wideness
Music covers a bigger spectrum of the experience of gameplay. What is so great is that I can play music by following a song, doing exactly the same as the bassist does, following the rules. Or I can play music and improvise my own patterns, developing my own melodies and have the freedom fun. Both are great and needed. Going from end to end of the spectrum is awesome, I can’t stop doing that. Back and forth.
There is not enough games going toward, designed for the play feel. The game I spent most of my time these past years is Tony Hawk on DS because I launch a quick “free skate” session and I can do whatever the hell I want. Same with Test Drive III from the last century. Same with Deus Ex. Freedom, improvisation in games are so great too. People play GTA for the sandbox environment more than the stupid ass story that we watched in much better movies ten times already. It strikes me that people playing games LOVE freedom too. So much. And yet so many game developers hire a writer to come up with a story when it’s just not important (the theme however, is. More on that later). Anyway it’s changing, slowly (Flower, Journey from ThatGameCompany).
I think the “play feeling” auto-generates the ability to build our own challenges, our own goals. It’s pretty fun on its own and it teaches us independent thinking and not depending on external rewards. I’m starting to see that people born during the 90s, deep fried into the reward society we built (especially you old farts), are unable to make decisions and set goals on their own, they need help. Once they are set they’re good but the independent system in their brain is underexploited, poorly efficient and trained.
Games are learning systems and when I see the awful harassment –to me- that Facebook games are with their cortege of sweet meaningless rewards, I think we should push more, expand games to a bigger part of our human experience if we don’t want people to turn like pushing-buttons chimps. For now these social games are doing exactly that.