Just thinking tonight about purpose. As I have mentioned before I would like to find some sense of purpose. To some extent this is serving the God of Games, but that is still a bit vague. So then I was thinking more about this blog and the idea of "developing the culture of video games". That seems to be a worthy purpose for this blog. I guess that might sound a bit ponderous. I will make it a bit more clear. Basically there are several levels to this that I will go into.
(Note) First off, the "video games" part of that is somewhat negotiable in that in many ways it could be replaced by the more general "gaming". But video games are the subdomain of games that I have been spending most of my time on this year and seems to be where my interests lie right now. One reason that "developing the culture of video games" works well though is because video games are a relatively new medium. They are developing and the story telling and art is getting gradually more sophisticated and developed. But it is still early days in many ways so it feels like it is relatively easier to participate in the discussion. There is a lot of writing and videos online by all kinds of people but it is less of a "cultured" realm of games. So in a way it seems like there is more room to say something interesting. Sports, chess, and go for example all have a well developed culture of writing and making movies or videos about them. So it is harder to find fresh ground to say something valuable. There is also a big skill gap. To really participate in the discussion about strategies you have to be at an advanced level. Video games as a realm seems a lot more wide open now. That being said, I am still interested in other games and can see myself coming back to them in various ways.
I.) So in some ways the top level is my religious ideas about the God of Games. Some of these ideas were cemented in a discussion with my wife the night before this one. This seems a creative development of the culture of gaming in that I haven't heard anyone else talking about this. It seems to be my original development. I have done a bit of this but have another post planned on the nature of Gods and what it means to worship / serve them.
II.) The next level down is my ideas about how games and the art of pursuing games meshes with serving the God of Games in the life of the gamer. That is how games and life are related. To some extent this has been done by other people. There seem to be a fair number of books at least in the chess realm about how life and games are related. But I think I might be able to expand the discussion. I have done some of this but intend to do more.
III.) The next level down is reading books about gaming or ludology and writing my thoughts on them. Some of these are books that I have but haven't read such as "Play Matters" or "Homo Ludens" (I started but didn't get very far with it). But there are also a number of books that I have already read but would like to re-read and write about such as "Struggle" by Lasker or "The Beauty of Games". This is another area that I don't see people doing much of at least in the places I browse. So I think by reading these books and writing about them I will be contributing something at least somewhat fresh.
IV.) [Post edited the next night to add this because I forgot and it seems important] The next level is continuing to read writing and watch videos on the internet and trying to engage in discussion with them even if it is only to call attention to something I really liked. I have done this some. It seems possible to do this in a fresh way because it seems like although there is a lot of material online, it is somewhat uncommon for writers to engage with other writing. RPS does this a bit with a feature they call "The Sunday Papers" which is a roundup of some interesting writing from around the internet and some light comments. But I feel like there is a lot of unexplored writing or videos out there. [/edit]
V.) The next level down is seeking to play interesting games and write about them. Again, here I mostly have in mind video games. I also have in mind lesser covered games whether they be AAs or true indie games. This seems to be fairly easy to do. There are lots of ways of finding new and interesting video games and I already have plenty in my library that I haven't played or written about yet. But, on the other hand, this is one area where it is a lot harder to do something to actually develop the culture of video games just because for any given game (even the offbeat ones that I tend to play) you can generally find a lot of reviews written by users and posted on Steam or on other sites. There are also generally some reviews written by more professional reviewers for many games. I have decided to freeze spending on games for awhile again so I won't be seeking out new games (although I do seem to have some channels for getting free games). But I think this is one area where I will just have to practice. I think there are two dimensions to this. One is playing as many games as possible to build up my experience and the second is practicing writing about them and trying to say something interesting. I probably won't be able to compete with sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun or Buried Treasure at least at the beginning for a whole variety of reason. But I think I want to be able to learn to do a better job at this. I have done some of this with my reviews so far but would like to continue.
VI.) The last level that I have in mind is being a creative player and writing about that. What I mean by this is developing creative strategies in the games I play and seeking out games that offer the player broad scope for creativity. There are several points I want to make.
VI. A.) So first off, by saying creative I am kind of purposefully not talking about a "hardcore" "git gud" or "min/max" approach to gaming. I have tried that to some extent with chess and it just ended in frustration. I think this is a big step for me in some ways because I have for a long time clung to the idea that I could learn to be really good at games and have approached games that way at least in terms of my expectations but haven't met those expectations with my actual success rate. I think I need to re-evaluate that and focus on "fun" as the priority and in a lot of ways to me fun mean two things, variety and creativity. Variety is another reason that video games are appealing. There is such a wide variety of games on the market that you can really explore a lot of different kinds of experiences. But even in one specific game whether it be chess or go or Magic or Civilization, variety is the spice of life. That being said, losing all the time isn't fun and the point of games is to try to win, so I do want my strategies to be at least a little bit successful.
VI. B.) So on the other hand, I am also not super interested in some extreme worst case for the sake of worst case kind of strategies. What I mean is that there are many examples of people playing games in strange bizarre ways to purposefully set themselves a much harder challenge. Sometimes this can seem amazing, like when someone gets through a Dark Souls game without ever being hit by an enemy. But sometimes it just seems kind of self-defeating. There was a recent RPS article about playing Schedule 1 without committing any crimes. If you can't guess from the title, it is a game about being a drug dealer. So although he technically found some ways to make money without committing crimes he wasn't really playing the game. I have no interest in playing Schedule 1 but it seemed kind of a pointless effort.
VI. C.) So what I do mean is finding ways to do interesting things that appeal to me. This could be as simple as playing Saladin in Civ 6 because I am interested in making science and religion work together philosophically so it is cool that in this game this leader has mechanics that do that. I don't think Saladin is considered the worst leader but I don't think he is considered the best either. But in general I am looking for ways to develop new ideas or ways of playing for the sake of new ideas. One example is Victoria 2 which is a video game about world affairs in the 1800s. It is a complicated simulation type game and models a wide variety of social phenomena. There is also no win condition. You set your own goal. For a lot of people this will be world conquest. But a goal I set for myself was to play as the UK and research all the cultural techs by the games end date without losing my world number one ranking. This may prove too difficult and I may have to modify it so that it is "research all the cultural techs while remaining in the top ten" or something like that. Again I haven't seen anyone else implement this idea. It was my own. Magic is in some ways a great example because it is a game that has a lot of creativity in the deck building. But there are several issues. One is that Magic is a very expensive game. That is probably the biggest issue. But it is also very complicated and a lot of people are playing. So, although it is relatively easy to build a deck that no one else is playing just by jamming cards together, it is harder to do something creative that actually has some chance of winning some matches.
VI. D.) So, I think that in some ways, this goal is a little bit contradictory with the previous one because the previous goal is more about breadth. The goal there is to play a lot of games and get a lot of different experiences under my belt so it is easier to say something interesting. This goal of being creative is more of a depth approach because to some extent it involves spending more time learning the systems of a specific game so it is possible to do something interesting. Also, again, while I want to put fun first, winning is a big part of the game. So while I will be content to win on lower difficulty settings, I do want to win sometimes. That takes time to learn the systems well enough to do that. There is also the issue that this approach is more restrictive in terms of the games that I will be seeking out. There are many interesting games that for whatever reason don't allow a whole lot of room for creativity although they may present interesting choices or have complicated narratives. Also, the previous goal is more about playing offbeat stuff that doesn't get as much coverage, but big games with a lot of scope are often quite popular.
VI. E) As to how easy it is do this in a fresh way, I feel it is another one for practice. There are very many people creating content about all sorts of strange and interesting ways of playing many games. So it might be challenging to find ways of doing something interesting. One possible solution is finding lesser known games that still have broad possibilities. Of course I am not trying to set the bar too high, and in some ways I think it is relatively easy to do something that suits me (such as playing Saladin) or something I haven't heard other people doing (like my Victoria 2 example). But as I practice and get more experience I hope I will develop more of a knack for coming up with original ideas.
VI. F.) So this is isn't something I have done much of in this blog so far. I did post my Taoist sage NPC but I haven't posted other examples really. I am not sure exactly how I will go about writing about this aspect of playing. But hopefully the method of explaining will come to me as I try out more ideas.
