Motherboard

Whether they require controllers, rocks or even our own bodies to be played, games have been around forever. They were, for a long time, the stuff of diversion; something to do “when the hunt is over and the wolves have been chased away and the dishes are washed,” as NYU gaming professor Frank Lantz puts it.

But somewhere along the way, something happened. We realized that games aren’t so rigidly purposed after all. They’re actually really weird — a wonderful, mysterious kind of weird. The kind that gets us thinking about how this strange activity of playing games fits into our lives, and how we can expand that role to open new dimensions of storytelling, rhetoric, intimacy and everything else in between.

The Ludic Age

“I would argue that we are now entering a ludic age, an age of play,” says New York game designer Eric Zimmerman. His work, the most recent being a life-size board game featured at the Museum of Modern Art, focuses on the theory that humans can understand the world better through interacting with game systems. Whether it’s chess or baseball or Gears of War, every game we play “is like a little laboratory for understanding how systems work.”

Zimmerman isn’t speaking metaphorically: Minecraft, one of the most explosively popular games of the past year, is perhaps the ideal representation of the ‘laboratory’ he’s talking about. Starting as little more than a collection of loose mechanics, the overnight indie hit owes its success not to fancy graphics or thoughtfully-constructed environments but rather to a carefully conceived foundation of rules that simply set the stage for a world of staggering possibility.

From those seeds of raw potential, immeasurable quantities of ideas sprout forth. A model spaceship built to scale, a functioning calculator, a portable games system simulated within the game itself — these are just a few of the surprising products such interactivity can nurture.

Playing A New Path To Meaning

Through these systems and the ways we’re made to interact with them, games are embarking on a kaleidoscopic journey in search of their own identity. First person, story-driven games like Bioshock are exploring narrative, and how interactivity and moral choice affect our relationships with the simulated people and places we encounter within them. Others, like Valve Software’s popular Portal series, begin as a demonstration of mechanics, slowly peeling back layers of the underlying story while forcing players to think creatively to solve problems.

Even within the confinement of narrative games, gamers are ‘playing’ their own paths to meaning. They are experimenting with what’s given to them, rejecting or subverting the intentions of designers to create new experiences. A quick look on YouTube and you’ll find people attempting ‘No Death’ runs in Minecraft and Bioshock, where just one Game Over means deleting the world or save file and starting from the beginning — a practice which completely changes how the game is played.

Mining The Mystery of Play

New spaces devoted to exploring these nuanced ideas of interactive media are popping up in the real world too, sometimes in unexpected places. NYC’s curated indie arcade Babycastles has been hosting expeditions into gaming’s strange new territories for almost 2 years. Videogame culture magazine Kill Screen has brought experimental games to one of New York City’s most respected museums. NYU is offering classes (and soon a major) devoted to the medium. All around, people are diving in head first to have a say in what games will become.

Go ahead and compare them to books or films or whatever feels comfortable. Call them ‘art’ or ‘not art’. It’s all irrelevant — games are embracing their own lack of definition, and they’re better off for it. They’re an enigma, a hidden vault of treasures slowly unearthed as designers continue spelunking in the ludic unknown.

Check out the PBS mini-documentary above, edited by Motherboard alum Chris Person and starring Eric Zimmerman, Babycastles curator Syed Salahuddin and more.

Connections:

• MBTV: Babycastles, the DIY Arcade
• Copenhagen Game Collective Keeps Games Broken & Weird, And We Like It
• A Videogame Night at the Museum: Kill Screen At MoMA
• Getting Play: Alt-Sexuality At The Arcade
• Brian Moriarty Is with Ebert: Video Games Aren’t True Art
• Motherboard TV: Oral History of Gaming: Eric Zimmerman