It’s 4:30 in the morning and I have to be at work tomorr—err, today, but for some reason I’m playing
[Prototype] again, from the beginning, to see if I can better my mediocre performance throughout the missions and side events during my first go-round.
The logical reaction to this sort of behavior would be, “What the fuck is your problem?” But I think I’m amongst company that knows full well of what I speak. This isn’t logic—this is gaming, and play has nothing to do with alarm clocks or deadlines or “when was the last time I ate?” It has its own drive, its own pulse, and it drives you at least as much as you drive it. The urge to pursue, conquer, slay, devour, decode, investigate, riddle-with-bullets, or pop sticker bubbles can be all-consuming, and it makes me ponder the reason for this compulsive, illogical, entirely addictive behavior.
I’m sure many of you saw the recent report on China’s brilliant use of
electroshock “therapy” for internet/gaming addicts, the majority of whom are teenagers, which was ordered cease stop by the country’s Ministry of Health. However much I desire to refer not just to video games but to acts of play in general, it seems that gaming—like gambling—creates greater compulsive behavior.
In gambling, the payoff is not only financial, but a feeling of acquired skill, stealth, strategy, and beating the system. The same (or similar) can be said of video games, where one desires not just to explore the world divulged in the system, but to discover and ultimately unravel the many faceted obstacles and intrigues programmed to obstruct your success.
With video games, however, I feel there’s something much deeper at play—the immersion and interaction a player experiences once hitting
<START> and plunging into whatever universe the developers have concocted, be it rapidly falling jigsaw pieces to the ethical dilemma of saving or sucking dry scores of Little Sisters. The fact that video games offer this interactive, action/response involvement creates not just a system of development and problem solving, but an anxiously desirable realm affected at every turn by a player’s instinct, insight, and imagination.
Gaming provides an other world that is beyond mere escape and traverses into the framework of
creation, empowering the player’s every touch of the D-pad with virtually limitless endeavors, custom experiences that change based on a variety of factors located almost solely within the player him/herself. This state of empowerment is both highly desirable and, as history’s legers and the rising of the sun on my sleeplessly addled brain inform, potently addictive.
We play beyond limits because we’re offered the limitless. We thwart common sense and even basic needs because the state we’re in—the gamespace—often has something far better to offer. The Chinese may have decided to cremate the brains of these experiential entrepreneurs, but at least in this world of mine, the worst I can do is…get fired?
BEDTIME!
Must play that game!
Word.
As much as you know you need to be sleeping, there always that "one more thing" you can hash out before you shutdown for the ... morning.
Maybe you can't sleep because you're consumed by guilt over harvesting all those little sisters??? You monster!
I like the gambling analogy, and I would add to it by saying that the payoff for some people in gambling is not just the winning, but also the losing. Gaming can be similar, I got stuck on a mission in Red Faction : Guerilla last night for about 30 minutes, and my wife just shook her head as I cursed, knowing that I wouldn't stop until I had mastered it. I'm a glutton for punishment that way.
Excellent post!
You just love to write don't you :]
Another fantastic blog, and I agree wholeheartedly :]
... just one more level! :)
It's been a while since I played a game so awesome that I just had to keep going like that. These days I usually stop when reasonable.
Prince of Persia recently had this effect on me, but for all the wrong reasons. I really did not enjoy playing it, but I "had" to beat it because everyone else I knew already had, and I was really late to the party!
This always happens to me with action games, no matter how little fun I have with them. There's too many of them to count, and so little time!
:] Mag I finished it lately as well. I found after getting 500 light seeds surprisingly it was fun to collect the light seeds. And I totally predicted the 1001th light seed and where it would be/what it would do :P The game itself gets tedious but it has its moments.
I look forward to the sequel. I hated all the Prince of Persia's except the PC/SNES version, Sands of Time and the sequel to that.
For me, this manifests most in the Metal Gear Solid series. I'm literally beyond the ability to track how many sleepless nights I've happily dumped into the series as a whole.
The other nasty one at the moment is Team Fortress 2. Once I get on a roll I just don't stop. By the time I've convinced myself a break is in order, my hands are practically destroyed. My left, nearly fused to the keyboard, and the bones in my right hand appear to have been molded specifically to sit over my mouse, like some kind of sickening meat-glove.
This rarely happens for me anymore. I was like this with RE5 for a bit, and I'm with Blindfire on MGS games. I played MGS4 at all different hours of the night, over and over for a couple weeks.
I used to be really bad about playing games until around 4am. After a while though, I started falling asleep while playing and waking up walking into walls and getting killed all the time. I decided that it was probably a good idea to stop getting to that point, no matter what.
I am looking forward to the next game that can convince me otherwise though. :)
And it's 5:20am . . . again.
I'm thinking: pancakes.
mmm pancakes, good call, i went with mac n cheese