Costikyan
1. “The desire for “cooperative games” is the desire for an end to strife. But there
can be none.”
I agree with this statement one hundred percent. Most games have to have some level of conflict or competition for it to be playable. Some of the most popular games are the simplest, one on one fighting games such as the Tekken series which I, personally enjoy playing. It feels good to engage in a conflict and emerge victorious. If the game is a puzzle to be solved, this doesn’t really apply but, as is stated earlier in the document, puzzles are different to games in that there is one single route to completion. You either solve the puzzle or you don’t. Simple. A game is very changeable and for this to work there needs to be a conflict of some sort.
2. “Why, then, did he design a game that encourages murder?”
This might seem like a strange statement to pick but I think it raises quite a few interesting issues. Although I feel saddened when I hear about a murder on the news I have no problem with shooting characters in a video game. For me, it’s the safety in the knowledge that I am able to vent frustration and anger and direct it towards characters that do not exist, much like the placebo effect.
3. “Games are fantasy.”
This relates back to statement 2. Games enable players to create their own little worlds. They can do what they like without affecting anyone in the real world and that is what a big part of the charm of games like ‘The Sims’ are for me. The player is given the opportunity to play God and they have complete control over what will happen in the game. They are able to play out fantasies that they have and do things that they would not be able to do otherwise (how else could they grow a man eating plant, for example?).
4. “Or perhaps we can have “interactive entertainment” without a goal?”
In my opinion, I think it is absolutely possible to have interactive entertainment without a goal. I can, again, refer to ‘The Sims’ here. The basic idea of this game is simply to live. That is all there is to the game. In essence, I see this, not so much as a game, but as a virtual toy of sorts. There is no goal, no objective and no set outcome. Another element that reinforces this is the player’s ability to build the entire environment of the game from scratch. Most other games have pre-designed maps that are not digressed from very much.
5. “... shared intense experiences breed a sense of fellowship”
I haven’t experienced this myself but I have watched this in action. This statement has a particularly strong truth for players who play online games with others, usually, from across the world. Working together and playing together seems to have the effect of creating an almost family group or even tribe. They are all working towards one goal and are helping each other in order to reach it. The old phrase “all for one and one for all” seems to come into play and players take this very seriously, not seeming to realise that none of them are in any danger and they are not really getting anywhere. They are just playing the same game.
6. “From the outside, game design looks easy.”
I have to admit that, when I first started my university course, I assumed that designing games would be easy which the statement illustrates. However, having looked at games in detail and dissected the different elements needed within a game, I can confidently say that it is not as easy as it seems. It is like writing a children’s book. Until you sit down and try to generate some ideas and concepts, you don’t realise what a complex art it is.
7. “Almost every game has some degree of puzzle-solving”
Even ‘The Sims’ has this element in it, despite its lack of a specific goal. One part of the game is that you can get a job and work your way up through promotions by gaining varying amounts of different skills. You have to get the skills and mood of the Sim in question balanced just right to achieve a promotion. Although this is puzzle-solving in the broadest sense, I believe it still applies.
8. “In many games, power is achieved by killing things”
As morbid as it sounds, I can understand this in the same way that I can understand statement 2 but killing to gain power, to me seems like an appeal to the more animal instincts. Having had a big interest in nature since I was a child I know that in a lot of animal families (most notably lions and polar bears) adult males will kill the leader or the young to gain power over the group and I think this translates into games. The gamer destroys the competition to become the most powerful and the most admired, even among other gamers thus achieving an almost “alpha male” status.
9. “Games are goal-directed interaction.”
Any game, I think, is about reaching some sort of goal (or even just an equilibrium in the case of ‘The Sims’, much of which is spent just trying to keep the sims happy). A game I have played that illustrates this rather well is a game based on the 1994 film ‘Jurassic Park
10. “Nothing is as sneaky and as hard to overcome as a determined human opponent”
I have first-hand experience of this. Whilst playing the Wii game ‘Mario Cart’ I played many races against the CPUs to get in some practice and to heighten my skills which, I thought, would prepare me for racing my younger brother whom I had seen playing this game against friends and rarely ever lost. Once I had run a few races against CPUs and won many times in succession, I felt confident that I would be able to take on my brother in a match. However, I soon found out that people and computers are very different thanks to their ability to think and I found myself losing and my brother walking away with his track record intact.
