The Game-ut of Gaming

It's been a relief to find that, lack of blog updates aside, I'm really not as far behind on GRaBaW as I had thought I was. By the time I get to posting this, there's a good chance I may actually have caught up [edit - I'm not, quite] - I yet again refer you to the beauty of a long-haul flight for actually getting things done. I certainly don't get to fly any distance very often, but I increasingly regard is as a magnificently distraction-free block of time in which to get things done. Or perhaps it's more a sign that I'm too easily distracted when the internet is available. 

I actually want to talk now about something other than books and reading, something which I've talked about on the blog before in some measure. It's one topic that gets me excited in a way that most others just don't, often to an obsessive degree, and while many don't share my fanatic love for it, I  sincerely believe it to be a fundamental aspect of human nature. If you hadn't guessed already, I'm taking about gaming.

I'm not limiting this to video games, though for many, these are synonymous with the term 'gaming'. I'm talking about games of nearly every form - card games, dice games, tabletop games, role-playing games, yes - video games, social games; games of skill, games of chance, games of skill with added variance. 

The tools of the trade

I'm actually stopping short of including sports because I really feel that they fall beyond my remit. It's not that I think they 'don't count' in some sort of definition-snobbery. You could easily argue for each of 'games' or 'sports' to be a subset of the other, and there would be those in both camps who would disagree with such vehemency that you'd quickly find running to be neither a game nor particularly sporting at that moment.

I mentioned above that I consider games to be a fundamental human activity - something that we're  wired to do. I'll talk about why I think that is in a minute (though I'm sure there are many more learned and scientific discourses on the topic). I have on my shelf a copy of 'The Royal Game of Ur', an ancient Sumerian board game. 

Ancient treasures - The Royal Game of UR (British Museum)

First, since I know that the majority of people do not share my overwhelming passion for games, at least consciously, I want to try and back up this contention. Gaming is an ancient pastime that does not appear to have been confined to any particular social class. Plenty of dice have been unearthed which date back to before recorded history. We have literally been playing games for longer than we have been writing. This may be why so many of us today fail to achieve our dreams of authorial fame as we spend some much time playing on the Playstation. Or something. 

The ancient Greeks and Romans had a healthy penchant for games, and many ancient games are still being played today. Surviving examples from China alone include Mah Jong, I-Ching, Chess, Cluedo (okay, perhaps not that last one). If you want to get a sense of the history of social games, check out this  infographic from Jon Radoff (his blog link appears to be dead, so I can't link to the true original source).

A further consideration which occurred to me today - have you ever encountered anyone who truly, completely doesn't like games, in any form? Okay, so this is entirely anecdotal, but I cannot think of anyone. Not everyone is as much of a gibbering fanatic as me (and, thankfully, some of my friends!). Some people don't enjoy playing epic big-box tabletop games which take 5 hours to finish, some people don't see the point in a simple game that comes down entirely to the chance roll of a dice (personally I'm not such a fan of up-chance gambling for this reason); some people love playing casual games on their phone, but wouldn't never dream of picking a fully-fledged console controller. But everyone has some sort of game that they enjoy. 

There are few things I this world that I enjoy as much as sitting down to play a game - but why exactly is that? Why do people take part in these activities which are essentially sideshows from the real world, and, arguably, have no point in and of themselves? I've heard many people disparage gaming in some form or other as a waste of time, one in which they don't understand why people would invest themselves. On one level, I find this a pretty fatuous argument, because you could apply the same thing to quite a significant portion of modern culture (why watch a movie, or read a book? At least part of it comes in deriving enjoyment from media for its own sake), but I do understand where this comes from. There is a difference between spending two hours watching a film and pouring hundreds of hours into living in a massive online world (but one which remains, conspicuously, not the real one), or the aforementioned five hour epic session round a gaming table. 

Generally speaking, I can see a few more obvious reasons that people enjoy gaming. The first is classic escapism - many games involve taking part in an activity which represents something of the real world while being largely divorced from it. This applies notably to video games, roleplaying games and many tabletop games. They can represent entire different worlds, the chance to play at being different people in a different situation which can be a million miles away from our own experiences or comfort zones. This can be so LIBERATING. It can be such a thrilling experience to step outside of your own life for a while. 

This doesn't mean that we're all so sick of their own lives that we're desperately searching for the chance to break free from them - I think instead that this is an impulse which comes from the same place as our love of stories and narratives - the same feeling you go through when you get so lost in a great book or film that it dominates your entire world for a short time. 

Games provide a way for us to make sense of things, and can act as social facilitators, giving people a guaranteed point of shared ground or a framework for an interaction. There are plenty of arguments to be made against this, and again, it's not to say that games should be a go-to substitute for genuine human interaction, but they give us a chance to explore social situations and learn things about each other that we wouldn't necessarily find otherwise. 

This also gives us the chance to act out different social roles. Those that have played group games with me will probably know that my behaviour can be very different depending on what we're playing (for better or worse…). I can be that sneaky, double-crossing, untrustworthy so-and-so if the situation calls for it, which (I hope!) is a long way from my everyday personality. 

On this last point, I'm touching on something that I want to cover in more depth in a future post. Simply put: games teach us things. About each other, as I've alluded to above, but you also just pick things up, as you would from fiction - facts and pieces of information, but also analogous experiences and ways of thinking that can surprisingly often be applied to everyday life.

Big boxes, small sneak preview

So there you have it, a wild flurry of my thoughts around gaming, and why I think it's such a big deal. I want to do a couple more, hopefully shorter, posts, where I can get into some specifics, and pick out some of the things I love about different types and styles of games, as well as some of the games I love and why. Hopefully some of my crazy passion for this has come across, and revealed something about myself.

If you've got your own counterpoints on games, happen to know someone who hates gaming in all forms, or just want to share your favourite games or gaming stories, post in the comments below.