Why?: Part II

Why games in general, and role playing games in specific?

I am interested in games because I am very interested in:

- creativity
- building relationships
- solving puzzles
- play
- thinking about ideas
- stories

Playing games with a serious-fun frame of mind, allows us to both step outside of ourselves, and engage with ideas serious or whimsical in a more naked fashion.  They may reveal something about ourselves to others, or reveal something about ourselves to us, but they allow us to inhabit a different mind-space.

Now I suppose that many more practical people don't see that, and when they see games they just think of the immediate result, which is something to the effect of "I just spent two hours playing and I have no more money in the bank, vegetables from the garden, or square feet of clean space in the house, so what good did that time have?"

I beg to differ.  The result from games is not material, and the reward is not always immediately obvious.  I will go so far as to say that not all game play has the same value; if I play a game of Candy Land with my wife, the value is going to be very low, but playing chess is a different story.

I think this has to do with how close the game can come to creating Flow which I alluded to in a previous post.  There has to be the sweet spot in game play between challenge and competence, and the challenge must evolve with the players.  A role playing game that is a railroad murder hobo grind is going to be far less likely to provide that Flow state than a game that explores what you are willing to sacrifice to succeed.  That pushes into that territory that Jenova Chen talks about in which the game provides emotional satisfaction beyond simple excitement.

The value to the practical minded, is that it allows us to peek into the dusty corners of our minds in a way that painting the house or gardening don't.  I don't deny the value of practical tasks either, and am quite of the mind that games should not be the most important or even a large percentage of our lives, but I think even the practical minded are impoverished by discounting the value of imaginative and creative play, no matter how old.  With social play, comes relaxation, and with that the ability to step outside of ourselves, and with that the possibility of stepping into the head-space of others, and that takes and builds trust, and trust builds relationships.  Games are not the only way to do this, but they are an ideal medium for carrying all those things.