Why Game? 1 - TextFiles.com

ourselves.”
When games left the arcades and went
home, is it possible that something was lost?
What was once a public experience had now
become private. The high score tables in your
shooting games contain your own initials, over
and over, along with maybe those of a handful of
people you’ve leant your copy to. A game is
played alone, not surrounded by people
watching intently, whom you will watch in turn.
Alone, there is no one to show your skills to;
there is no one more skilled to demonstrate how
to complete the parts you find difficult. There’s
no thrill of showing a novice something they
have never seen before.
In this way, super play movies might fill a
necessary role that has been abdicated, creating
a community where there no longer might be
one. That doesn’t explain, however, the
proliferation of so many movies that are not
super plays. Role playing games. On the Speed
Demo Archive message boards, posters ask if
anyone’s interested in seeing a speed run of
Shenmue. The Internet Archive hosts a video of
someone sailing around a lighthouse in Second
Life, and a number of videos of events in World
of Warcraft set to music. Why?
I think it has something to do with what
Will Wright called “owning your experience” in
his GDC Spore demonstration. During his talk,
he mentioned Grand Theft Auto. What had
become important to him while playing the
game was not the missions and cut-scenes that
the game’s developers had designed for the
player to plod through, but the individual stories
that emerged from the unique experiences
Wright encountered as he explored the game’s
world, mechanics and limitations.
Videogames, as media, are different from
novels and films in that each player will have a
very different experience when playing a game.
Narratives emerge which are unique to one
player’s experience; events may unfold in a
completely different order for another player. I
record demo play movies of games I like, games
which I think are obscure enough that not many
players have encountered, and enjoyable
enough that more players should. In those
movies I play in such a way as to make the rules
of game obvious and understandable to a person
who is seeing them for the first time. The movie
contains a narrative that the player watches
and, hopefully, in watching, learns from. That
narrative exists in that movie only; it can never
be recreated exactly. Is it the recording that’s
important?
I would argue that it’s the communication.
Gaming is an experience that, like any other,
needs to be shared (and frequently, at least for
me, needs to be shared to be validated). What’s
being shared is something very intimate: the
player, even more than the game. It’s a
transcription of the player’s nuances, choices,
decisions, what is important and what is
interesting. It is not the kind of thing that can
be shared in a block of prose on a message
board. This is, I think, why video recording is
and will continue to be necessary.
At least until we’re all gathered around the
arcade machine again.
Speed Runs and You 45