Game Theory: talking videogames at the New York Times

Games as ballet, a playwright on the medium, and (sorry) me talking about ladies, again.

Before Christmas, I was lucky enough to be asked to take part in the New York Times‘s “Game Theory” strand, talking about the year in videogames. (The idea comes from writer Chris Suellentrop, who has run a version of it in previous years on Slate.)

Having read all the pieces, I’m thrilled that a non-specialist title hosted something like this, and thought I’d point up a few of the bits which stood out to me. First, Lucy Prebble – who wrote the play Enron – writes about what games can do that other media cannot:

For me, there’s a sort of identification with your character that other media will never be able to replicate. A game makes a player its subject, while the tyranny of the director’s point of view in film and the author’s withholding of detail in fiction both place the viewer as an observer in the world.

(Incidentally, her game of the year was Catherine, for asking “what gamers are really afraid of. Zombies? Aliens? Terrorists? Or relationships?”)

I also really liked Jenn Frank’s piece on dying in games, talking about Super Hexagon and Hotline Miami. She wrote:

How does a game torture you, the player, without making you stamp off in defeat? It’s a fine line to walk, and the makers of both games handle it deftly: These games succeed by making the barrier to re-entry so low. The player, in turn, is never permanently punished. (Some games are needlessly vindictive; Hexagon and Miami are instead forgiving, in their own way.)

(If you enjoyed that, do read Wired‘s recent piece by Andrew Groen on the mini-trend for “permanent death” in games here.)

For me, though, the most unexpected piece was Suellentrop on the link between videogames and ballet – chiefly because I had never thought of the comparison before, and because we so often talk about games in relation to films.

Ballet is “an art of memory,” Homans writes. “No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations variations, whole ballets.” She continues, “These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones.” And so do gamers, when they know a video game. The players of Call of Duty and Halo have more in common with ballerinas than either might like to admit.

There’s also an interesting response to this from Kirk Hamilton, who points out that playing games is more like doing ballet, than watching it, and perhaps that’s why it can be so hard to convince non-gamers to try the medium.

Elsewhere, Gavin Purcell, a producer for Jimmy Fallon’s TV show, wrote about “antisocial games” – the ones that suck your time and make you feel guilty; Hamilton writes about the mechanics of shooters getting stuck in a rut; and Stephen Totilo addresses game violence in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre. The whole series can be found here.

PS. I wrote about women in games – “there’s been a definite backlash against the idea that women are entering the hallowed citadel, dropping in a few scatter cushions and ending all the fun” – and my piece is here.

There’s also a response from Stephen Totilo, who has pointed out an intriguing-sounding game from Anna Anthropy, called Dys4ia, about the challenges of being transgender, and Anna’s book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form. Which is quite the title.