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GETTING OLD AS A GAMER MEANS YOU SEE THE STRINGS - by Mr Biffo

24/8/2016

23 Comments

 
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As I've gotten older, I've come to the conclusion that the reason why youth is favoured and celebrated in our society has nothing to do with us preferring to see Tom Daley in a pair of Speedos than Gerard Depardieu. It's because the young are more pliable, less cynical - and easier to convince that what they're doing matters. 

That's not meant to sound jaded; there are lots of things that matter in the world - and what's important differs for each of us. 

Yet a lot of the stuff we're told is important growing up - not putting your elbows on the table, or being a "success", or not eating your dinner off the floor - are just constructs. 


From the moment we're born we're taught the rules, and those rules so become part of who we are that it takes enormous energy to break them. Not having a degree in some way makes you defective. You're weird if you don't have kids. You must like The Beatles. Support our troops. The pressure to be what our world has deemed normal - or valuable - is immense. ​

If I was more cynical than I am, I'd suggest that society doesn't care what we do, so long as what we do  serves to raise tax revenue, and not rock the boat.

​The purpose we're all assigned is to help maintain the structure of our civilisation - but that's never explicitly stated, as it's too big and abstract an idea. Instead, society doles out invisible, unobtainable prizes upon which our feelings of worth can rise or fall.
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NOTHING REALLY MATTERS
Go through enough in life - as most of us do - and you realise that none of it really matters.

Literally nothing is important, except what's important to you. Getting older means that priorities swirl around, and take on new shapes.

​Focus shifts - much as my eyesight is, with alarming speed, going from being shortsighted to longsighted.

I don't just see things up close anymore. To read something I have to hold it at arm's length, which gives me a wider perspective.

Those big, scary, upsetting, life events can leave scars, but they're also transitory. You see them in the context of a life. Right here and now for you is all that matters, not whether you're working towards having a number one single. 

It's hard not to view the importance society places on ambition as an effective carrot dangling on the end of a stick. We'll work harder, faster, earn more money if we think there's a pot of gold at the end. Being successful, getting that promotion, publishing that book... because if you don't then you've failed. You're a failure. And nobody wants to feel like that.

But the concept of being a failure exists only because it has been drummed into us from birth. 

STRING THEORY
The strings which control us, and shape us when we're young have, for me anyway, become that much looser. It feels that as I've started to see that ambition, and success, is something they want me to reach for - because it helps power the engine of society - that the society loosens its grip on me. It turns its back on us, to face the young, beautiful things.

Who are - lest we forget - all complete idiots staring into their phone cameras, who are still too stupid to realise the enlightenment which comes through maturing. The best thing is... I don't even really care.

Because we live in a holographic universe, where everything we do or feel is a part of every other thing we do or feel, big or small... I can apply this to video games.

When I was younger, I took the rules of a game at face value. Suspension of disbelief was easier. It didn't matter that I couldn't do literally anything in Skool Daze - I ignored the walls of the gameplay, and took it at face value. I could mostly forget it was a video game, which only wanted me to do certain things.

I wonder whether the backlash against No Man's Sky is because we all thought we were getting a game without walls, without rules, where we could go anywhere and do anything. When it came to it, and after spending a good length of time with it, those rules were everywhere.

​The game has a very narrow focus, and after a time it feels constricting. Perhaps if there had been some sort of more structured narrative, more of a reason to be doing what the game allowed you to do, it would've been easier to suspend disbelief, and go with it. But no. Instead, we were given a game where the strings which pulled on us were all too visible.
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LESS MAGIC
I remember playing Castle Master on my Atari ST, and it feeling like a limitless world to explore. It wasn't, of course, but it felt that way, because it never felt to me like there was a human hand behind it.

​These days, we know the faces behind the games. We know the work that goes into them, and we're given unprecedented access to the development process - more than at any time in the history of gaming. Our games arrive with the explicit knowledge that they've been made by people.


Consequently, just as I can see now that ambition and other societal constructs are simply that - rules that have been invented by human beings - I can see that games are nothing more than a set of rules. Once upon a time, when I was young, it felt as if their horizons stretched on forever. They felt like they'd grown organically, or were a portal to somewhere else. 

That doesn't mean I necessarily enjoy games less, but they certainly have less magic for me than they once did. But that can be applied to the world as a whole. The longer I stay alive, the more I see how everything works and fits together, like parts of an engine. Whether that engine is one powering our video games, or our society. You have to work harder to suspend your disbelief.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
​EVERYTHING I KNEW ABOUT GRAPHIC DESIGN I LEARNED FROM ULTIMATE PLAY THE GAME
THE ART THAT INSPIRED NO-MAN'S SKY
​
GAME REVIEWS: HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO FORM AN OPINION? - BY MR BIFFO
23 Comments
Oliver Wright
24/8/2016 11:35:03 am

Doesn't that work the other way too, though? I know that my 'guitar friends' are constantly selling me I'd appreciate 'guitar music' a lot more if I knew how to 'play the guitar'.

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Chris Wyatt
24/8/2016 09:09:52 pm

I used to think guitars were magical, until I saw the strings.

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Iain Harley
25/8/2016 08:53:23 am

Magnificent.

TekMerc
24/8/2016 01:01:46 pm

"The longer I stay alive, the more I see how everything works and fits together,"

I find the opposite. The longer I am alive the less sense the world makes, the more I see how everything doesn't work. Just a planet full of humans doing whatever.

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Doc Strange
24/8/2016 02:00:30 pm

But one doesn't contradict the other. Seeing how the world works could mean an acknowledgement of how objectively meaningless everything is and how society doesn't actually consist of anything beyond competition rewards and survival. Humans being nihilistic and life existing randomly in a godless universe could be 'how everything works and fits together'. I don't necessarily believe in these things but I just think 'the more I see how everything works and fits together' doesn't contain anything contradictory to 'a planet full of humans doing whatever'. I guess what I'm saying, in a convoluted way, is I don't think your conclusion is the opposite to his. They are compatible opinions.

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DrDagless
24/8/2016 02:17:39 pm

I'm the same. As a child it seemed like everyone and everything had a place, a reason for existing, but with every year that passes I do find myself thinking about how random and pointless everything seems.

Still, Star Wars: Rogue One is out at Christmas, so that's something I guess.

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Neilo
24/8/2016 04:11:32 pm

I think its more like seeing the boom mike during a movie, once you get removed from an immersive experience i think it takes away from it somewhat

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Wet Ham
22/9/2016 05:39:41 pm

As a child you have this innate trust in adults, which quickly evaporates as you become one and you realise almost everybody is a functioning idiot and incompetent.

I don't remember quite so many idiots at school. There were some pretty dumb kids, but they were outnumbered by the capable.

So, what happens between school and adulthood to completely dumbify everyone? Who knows?! Not me. I'm an idiot now.

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Chris Wyatt
22/9/2016 05:53:05 pm

Drink, drugs and age-related disease? Pretty sure I became an idiot during university (ironically)

Chris Wyatt
22/9/2016 06:06:19 pm

I also think the boredom and soul destroying nature of modern adult life has something to do with it. It's an interesting thought and the same thing has occurred to me, which I've sort of dismissed as paranoia, but I do feel that everyone seems more stupid than they used to. I can never tell if the world is shit, or if it's just my changing perception.

I think adult life can make or break people, and people that functioned well as kids may not always become the most functional adults, and vice-versa.

I've certainly not aged gracefully and feel that I've turned into a bit of a twat. I feel I've made lots of stupid mistakes that have probably made me a worse person, but oh well, we'll all be dead eventually, and then nothing will matter anymore anyway (it's debatable whether it does while you're alive).

But anyway, on that morbid note...

Stuart
24/8/2016 01:32:08 pm

I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D and Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold at a friend's house on PC when I was about 11 or 12, and thinking they were incredible. Then my family got their own computer, and I got Dark Forces and Jedi Knight, much more advanced 3D shooters, and was just blown away. This was my Star Wars.

Those early experiences are golden, and are as much about the age you are when you play them as the quality of the games themselves. While you can't really recapture the feeling, I've recently gone on to play genre-defining games, such as the original Tomb Raider, Earthbound, and Metroid 2: Return of Samus, and getting totally sucked into them. I can only imagine what the experience would have been like had I played them when I was younger, at the time shortly after they were released. It's very compelling when a game is only just beyond your comprehension, all mysterious with weird ambience, and you have absolutely no idea what to expect.

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Kendall9000
24/8/2016 05:43:10 pm

The wealth of easily available information about games has definitely dented the magic for me. Not so much because I can see the hand of man in what I'm playing, more because it's hard to go into a new game without some knowledge of it, and even harder for me to resist looking for information if I get stuck or things don't make sense.

Back in the day, without the web, and with only the often cryptic instructions to guide me (assuming I'd actually bought the game to get even that), many games were a real mystery when I first started playing. That's especially true of various old RPGish games, like Starflight, Captain Blood, Wasteland, or the early Ultimas, which really felt like I was exploring a mysterious new realm. Not having a clue what I was doing was part of the fun, and made eventually figuring it out and making progress all the more satisfying.

Now that I've finally got around to playing Fallout 4, I've already had various plot points spoiled, and I'd seen many of the features demoed back when I was following its development. The game might be relatively massive and full of detail compared with oldies that fitted on a floppy disk, but there isn't quite the same feeling when I start exploring. At the moment I'm fighting the urge to watch someone's Youtube video guide to building settlements. Unfortunately patience and self control aren't among my many virtues.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
24/8/2016 07:35:24 pm

I was in the process of formulating a Fallout 4-related response to all this when I saw your post, so I'll put it here.

Fallout 4 doesn't grab me because none of it seems to matter or make logical sense. I haven't finished the game yet, but every illogical thing is hand waved away with 'The Institute' and every location is just part of a big silly theme park of activities for you to find and do as you wander to and fro trying to care about the family you barely had time to meet. Contrast with New Vegas, where you had the forces for rebuilding the world (NCR) facing down brutal slavers (Caesar's Legion) and it was pretty clear what was at stake. In Fallout 4, I am told I should build this settlement or go visit this location or help these people and I ask "why should I want to?"

Likewise, Elite Dangerous. It is patently obvious that the game is all smoke and mirrors, with pirates spawning out of the ether so they can attack you and make the game exciting, police spawning to chase them to make it more exciting, and with working for a faction amounting to increasing your number with them so their overall number goes up. NPCs simply appear so it looks like the world is alive. Your influence on the world is limited to altering which local faction's power bar is fullest, and maybe you can make the price of a commodity change somewhat. But you can't build anything, destroy anything, change anything. Why should you want to?

Starbound and Minecraft compel you because it all makes sense within the confines of the game's own set of rules. I don't think I've ever asked "why can't I..." in either of those games. You are still limited in what you can do, but it never really feels like the game is being unfair, or that it is restricting you needlessly. The only 'why should I want to?' comes from following the main quest line that both games offer, but that is entirely optional, there is plenty to do if you aren't in the mood. It's telling that Fallout 4's settlement building was thrown together at the last minute as a side activity, and yet it's the thing that has grabbed people's attention the most.

(I have found that exploring for its own sake is better if there is a survival element... the industry seems to have figured this out, too)

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Jez from work
24/8/2016 07:26:53 pm

When you write of the artificial construct of society it chimes with my generally unspoken view of things. I'm nowhere near articulate enough to explore my take on this stuff but just like when agent smith says that humans are a stinky virus I'm all like, "yup". Similarly I didn't realise how atheist I was until I went out with a kind of catholic girl and she brought up the subject of god which prompted a large read up on the Dawk and friends, and perhaps our ultimate separation. I guess what I'm asking for, M. Bifeau, is some links to further reading. Thanks, your friend Jez ((from work) not your work.)

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Omniro
24/8/2016 07:42:43 pm

There are many games I played as a child or in my teens that seemed like enormous worlds that contained this mysterious alien essence to them. My imagination filled in the blanks where the technology of the time couldn't cope. And for a while, No Man's Sky gave me a hint of that essence during the first 10-15 hours of play, before the curtain was pulled back and the wizard was revealed.

I think the reason so many NMS players feel so angry about the game is because we're all looking for an experience that exists in our imaginations, that we know could be created with today's technology, but time and time again games developers fail to deliver for us. We project our desires on to the promise that the tech demos and PR spiel seem to hint at. The last time this happened to me before NMS was with Destiny. It seemed like this huge, expansive world we'd be able to not just play in, but sort of "live" in. But the reality was just a bunch of levels you visit over and over again, much like the promise of NMS's infinite universe turned out to be 18 quintillion levels of pretty much the same thing.

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Starbuck
24/8/2016 09:03:41 pm

Lords of Midnight. The original Elite. MUD. These set our imaginations free in terms of limitless potential. And within limited technical parameters they were like witchcraft.

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Dr Kank
24/8/2016 09:27:10 pm

You can get Lords of Midnight for free on the Kindle, the graphics surprisingly look really nice. I've no idea what I'm supposed to be doing though.

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CdrJameson
24/8/2016 11:06:56 pm

Society does rely on the young being hopelessly naive and optimistic, but this is not a bad thing.

Becoming some crazy success (film/rock star, successful entrepreneur/inventor, game/app developer etc.) has to happen to SOMEONE but odds of that someone being YOU are practically nil. Older people seem to notice that shooting for the moon is a sucker bet, but fortunately younger ones don't, because the person that hits the moon pays for all the people that tried and failed.

If we were all sensible nobody would ever enter a hit-driven business, and we'd have no hits. Best to have some crazy targets when you're young and can cope with missing. Because the vast majority of you will. But we need the one who doesn't.

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David W
25/8/2016 11:17:16 am

I think there's a difference between manipulation in society and games, both having good and bad types.

If someone tells you that being a star is the key to happiness, it's probably a lie for their benefit. Perhaps they want to sell more music, or need fresh victims for their humiliation show. Good manipulation is being warned not to eat brown honey found on the floor.

There's overlap where society sells games. Deceitful marketing is generally accepted until it hurts the bottom line. Some people most want customers to enjoy their trick show, others see goodwill as fuel for the current financial quarter.

Like what Oliver Wright said about guitars, it's possible to appreciate games on a deeper level when you can see the strings and limitations. Such as board games, where the rules are known beforehand, and the interest lies in what they help generate. I don't agree about unprecedented access behind the scenes though, as people were typing in computer game listings thirty years ago.

That drive to explore new worlds comes from a strange place, certainly not manipulation by people who say don't rock the boat. Those worlds need to have some form and structure, like patterns in organic growth, otherwise the near-infinite random noise of a detuned analogue television receiver would be enough. The worlds need to be better than what we know, but believable when we see it.

Another strange drive is to create new things, which upsets societies that assign a place for everything. This can be demonstrated by giving a random child some colouring pencils and blank paper. You probably won't know what their scribbles represent, but they'll tell you anyway. The desire for coherent construction is probably best demonstrated by the success of Minecraft, which has very clear rules.

The exploration drive makes it pleasing to experience attempts at creating new, yet familiar worlds. The creative drive views any shortcomings as hints for making something better, closer to that unknown ideal. Then people try to harness those drives for other purposes, leading to unsatisfying games for £50 and other messy compromises.

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lilock3
25/8/2016 01:44:31 pm

I think I've always been able to see the string in games. I like figuring out systems, the ways in which the games work, and then being able to manipulate and control things as a result of having that understanding. I can't help but feel as though I've missed out on something by never having had that belief in a boundless virtual world...

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Hamptonoid
25/8/2016 08:27:56 pm

"Go through enough in life - as most of us do - and you realise that none of it really matters. "

Oh, totally. Of course, the great irony is now that I'm old enough to understand this, I have too many responsibilities to actually live it.

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wunk
26/8/2016 12:42:23 pm

Nice piece. I could get quite melancholic thinking about this too much. I find it's best not to think too much as I get older. That's either wisdom or laziness, I'm not sure which yet,

Also - Castle Master! Thanks for awakening that memory Mr B. I also had this on Atari ST and felt similar. I really miss that sense of wonder I used to get with games in my youth. It has to be the simple sad fact of just getting older that robs us of this, or is it something more?

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Some guy
23/1/2018 10:50:24 am

Any social system worthy of the name tolerates a little rocking. Bend, not break, is the order of the day.
By letting itself wobble left and right a bit, it can squeeze through gaps it wouldn't fit through otherwise

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