Play Broadly

Today I'd like to talk about the merits of playing lots of different games. We know that people generally are highly engaged when they are learning and developing mastery, and achieving something called "flow".

In the Play* series I've been writing, I'm hoping to provide people with reasons to game and also talk about what gaming does for players. My focus is on tabletop roleplaying experiences, but it applies generally to the concept of play; from sports, to video games, to virtual reality and live action experiences.

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I've mentioned the concept of games as "learning machines" before, something that I've cited Dr. Gee, a linguist and education researcher who writes in length about video games.

In short: games tend to thrill and engage us for a number of reasons, one of which is that they offer an ability to pursue novel experiences and develop mastery.

People who say that they are "bad at learning" in a school environment, for instance, may find that they could have a very different attitude if they reflected on all the learning and mastery they achieve in other contexts. Someone who struggles to improve their aptitude in abstract mathematics classes may find that they have no problem working with fairly abstract game mechanics and knowing how to calculate the numbers that they involve: they may have invested heavily to learn these things, or it may be that they have finally found a motivation they have not had in past efforts to learn similar concepts.

For this reason, playing multiple games, rather than just one, can help broaden a person's horizon. Each game has a particular set of skills and practices that it seeks to reward the player for; from the twitch-reflexes and steady hands required for a frenetic first-person shooter like Quake to the spatial awareness and lateral thinking required to tackle puzzles in Portal or Myst. These games develop particular aspects of their players, but they typically ignore others.

This allows players to achieve mastery in a safe environment. A game like Elite Dangerous is often considered "too hard" by players because it requires a lot of investment to get into, but highlights this notion very well. The feeling of learning and achieving mastery is focused when a player or learner can focus simply on growing in one sphere of development. Tying back to education and learning, many students find school difficult not because of content, but because of the juggling act that occurs when they are at school: socialization with peers and faculty in unfamiliar contexts, many different subjects over the course of a day, the stress of academic, familial, and social obligations with strict deadlines.

Very complex games tend to be very difficult and drive away novices. The Tribes series, for instance, combined high spatial awareness requirements with very high manual dexterity and reflexes being required for success, with strategic concerns and the need for communication and cooperation layered on top. Few people disliked the game, but many people couldn't commit to playing it and a small elite community developed; even though they were generally welcoming to newcomers, the difficulty floor of the game and the tight social bonds left little room for novices.

The majority of the games that people play and stick with tend to be the ones that reward mastery of a relatively small skill-set. Many of these games even are designed to facilitate a certain amount of give; a Counter-Strike player who is less cooperative may still do well in many situations simply because they have exceptional aim and reflexes, while great teams with poor players can still be beaten handily.

Even just learning to play can be a skill in and of itself can be a goal that motivates players; Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, has recently had a resurgence in popular culture with more celebrities and everyday people playing it openly than in any other point of its history, helping to dispel some of the negative stereotypes about D&D players.

However, games are not just about skills, they're also about meaning and storytelling. Games like Spec Ops: The Line, Morrowind, and even the recent DOOM reboot–which prided itself on being "story optional"–all have messages and lessons in them, and draw upon archetypal figures and patterns of storytelling. Tabletop roleplaying games in particular center around the format of storyteller and player; where a digital game is typically going to provide either a flexible but less narrative experience or a deep, but linear experience akin to a movie or book in storytelling methods, these games serve as an exploration of meaning first, and skill second.

This process ties deeply into the exploratory nature of play, the ability to test and probe without needing to risk anything. The worst that happens is failure in the game–something that holds little consequence. I talked about this in length in a previous article, so I won't go into too many details about it here.

And one of the important things to do with any pursuit of meaning is to search for context and correlation. It is easy to misread a single source, or fail to develop thoughts that are presented in only one way. Playing Dungeons and Dragons is a very different experience than playing a game set in the Warhammer 40:000 universe in terms of the stories they tell and many of the lessons they hold, but they often share common and important points, like the need for ordinary people to choose to do heroic things (nothing other than Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey) and the importance of protecting what is held dear.

Games teach us skills, and present us with meaning for our lives. When you play, you should be thinking about that. Don't get stuck in a rut; there's nothing wrong with seeking mastery in one area, but it's also worth experimenting and branching out to see if there's something else across another horizon, something that could change the way you live your life for the better.