The Point of Games

My personality is such that my interests come in successive stages of unanimous curiosity. An interest in baking will lead to an appetite for medieval history. And so, naturally, a read-through of George Friedman's "The Next 100 Years" led, not only to other books on the subject (e.g., R. Kaplan, "The Revenge of Geography"), but also to another subject, perennially dear to my heart: computer games.

And, moreover, to one specific game, 'Medieval II: Total War'. Like its siblings in the 'Total War' franchise, the cutely-abbreviated 'M2TW' gives a mixture of turn-based strategy and real-time tactics. You take command of a European faction in the 13th century and forge your path to hegemony, whether by trade or trickery, chivalrous alliances or main force of arms.

Such a pastime would obviously whet my appetite to get "hands-on" with geopolitical maneuvering; but — as I led the Serenissima Repubblica di Venezia to domination first of the Balkans and Asia Minor, and then of Transalpine Gaul &mdash it afforded another thought.

Games like these are fun — but why? Considered objectively, there is nothing intrinsically enjoyable about clicking and watching colored shapes; so why should we ever find such things other than tedious?

Obviously, because they are representational — that is, these games have "sign value". A game like M2TW "is" nothing very worthwhile, just as an octagonal piece of red metal "is" nothing very special. Rather, we look "through" these things to something else they were originally made to represent.

If a stop sign represents a traffic ordinance, a game like M2TW represents a story — or, rather, that the confines of the game allow the player to spin his own story.

Of course, absolutely none of this is original with me. Games as Storytelling Device is a topic that has been extensively (even exhaustively) worked over for decades (that is, after all, the essence of the Role-Playing Game).

But it did serve to distract me long enough to put me on my next track. And that's why I'm a third of the way through Dan Simmons' "Hyperion".