If you’ll indulge my demonstrative back-story for a moment or two, I’ll get to the meat.





I’m a PhD candidate at a strange, international graduate/post-graduate school in Switzerland that sets its students to work online throughout the year and then throws them into an intense, three-week marathon of media theory and philosophy in a brain fuck that leaves you both numb and thrilled by the time you descend from the Alps. I got my B.F.A. in Film and my M.A. from this same school in Switzerland (http://www.egs.edu), where I was drawn by the list of filmmakers and my favorite (at the time) philosopher, Jean Baudrillard. I didn’t quite know I was diving head-first, unprepared, and blindly into philosophy boot camp.

But I’m a trooper. I ask questions; I’m vocal; I demand the best from my instructors as, I suppose, they demand the best from me, and these are luminary academics, artists, theorists, etc. Most—not all—but most were obliging to the challenge I set out for both them and myself, and the experience of four summers in the Alps changed my life entirely. Yet I didn’t know what I was preparing myself for.

With an academic background in film, theory, philosophy, yet two handy degrees vaguely dubbed “Media & Communications,” additional skills in photography (since I was a teenager), writing (my passion since I was 6 and vocation since I was 22), I wasn’t entirely sure what the fuck profession I was fit for. Even in the academic world, I was too interdisciplinary. Scholastic institutions prefer narrow specialists, but I could teach film theory, screenwriting, creative writing, literature, philosophy, media theory, and found myself groping from institution to institution, department to department, hunting for anything that would take me. I finally began teaching an online philosophy/pop culture class for an art college, which spiraled into my taking on multicultural theory, film history, genre theory, storytelling for film, and a multicultural literature class I authored myself for the luxury of teaching literature in the first place (the only way I could do so lacking an English degree).

But somehow, someway, I ended up in the gaming industry. I won’t say for whom I work, so you needn’t inquire, but the position utilizes every one of the skills I’ve been honing since that tender age of 6 when I was penning depressing, somewhat alarming poetry about my shattered home life. I was to write and manage editorial content for a company’s internal development website, which called upon me to conduct interviews (a stint as intern-turned-assistant editor of a film trade publication helped me there), write articles, incorporate my photographic, film & sound editing skills, and learn all about this great big gaming industry about which I knew very little.

I’m about to get relevant here, so don’t give up on me yet. The dissertation I’d been researching for a year and a half revolved around the concept of identity, subject/object relations, and how I believed narratives and storytelling brought an individual closest to experiencing another’s subjectivity as humanly possible. Then I found myself in this fascinating new world—a world I’d successfully avoided to prevent the addiction I knew it would inflict (success!)—and also a world suffering from a relative void of active, theoretical pursuit.

So I changed my dissertation topic to the question of identity in gaming, and my very first and unavoidable question is: Why do we game? What draws us in? This isn’t a world where you pick it up for an hour, maybe two, then get back to it later, nor one in which you steal a few pages on break, but a space and place where people devote hours every day in pursuit of…of what? Not every gamer is like this, to be sure—the so-called “casual” gamer—but the core of us (though I still consider myself a noob, my rabid zeal qualifies me amongst the ranks) dedicate many hours each day toward conquering some goal, immersing ourselves in worlds of fantasy and/or violence and/or strategy—what is it we’re looking for? What are we after? From where is the satisfaction drawn?

Speaking for myself, I delight in testing my own skill and surpassing my prior achievements. I don’t get off on flaming other noobs to death or even ripping a veteran to shreds. As I’ve previously stated, I’m not a terribly competitive person—but something drives me, hooks me, seduces me into these vast terrains of almost unlimited potential. Is it that very potential that is so alluring? That, in participating by experience of the game, we are treading new paths toward what the future may bring?

I know there is also something very significant—if not inherent—to the concept of the community and interactivity in the game. If we’re not co-opping online or on multiplayer in the putrid depths of a friend’s basement, the A.I.s, the mechanics, the worlds themselves respond to the actions we make in-game, and this type of action/response is extremely exciting on a fundamental, human level.

So I ask you, gaming community, “casual” or “hardc0re” gamer—why do you play?