Against Analytical Games Appreciation

This post is a little underdeveloped, but it outlines why I decided to start a blog.

There's this great GDC talk, "You Have No Idea How Hard It Is To Run a Sweatshop", and it has this slide which I really enjoyed:

The talk covers the folly of games attempting to create meaning through theme only to have players discover the underlying mechanisms of games and, over time, seeing the theme as only pretty makeup over core mechanics and calculations. And I suppose what appealed to me about this is that I feel the general process for analyzing games does exactly this, intentionally. As game makers, we try think about games in terms of these mechanics which might lead to a good user experience. Coyote time makes platformers feel more responsive, pop-up tooltips bring information efficiently to players, camera shake makes hits feel more responsive, etc.. We try to learn lessons from the games we play that seem generally applicable, easily reproducible.

But very little of the analysis I see of games takes an approach which centers the user experience, and that experience is the very thing that determines whether we want coyote time or this or that kind of pop-up or how the camera shake should work, etc.. If every game offers a different user experience, then the lessons learned from one game cannot apply to another which seeks a different user experience, thus the analysis becomes difficult.

Well, maybe it does, but I think it misses the point if we don't focus on that experience. We believe games are a form of art and expression, and yet we boil them down to products which can be evaluated against a set of objective criteria of quality based on their construction. 

I've decided that I want to look at games in a new way. When I review a game, I want to less talk about the game itself, and more tell the story of me playing the game. What interested me about it? How well did it meet or subvert my expectations? What meaning did I take away from the experience? What does this game tell me about its makers and what are its makers saying to me? To speak not of the game itself, but my experience of it. Maybe this is a bit of a subtle point, but if I review a game, I don't want the reader walking away thinking about whether I thought the game was good or bad, but rather to understand why I did or did not like it; how my individual psychology influenced my appreciation of the title.

And I want to do this with the confidence of knowing that while I am unique, many others will experience the world in the same way as I do and therefor sharing my subjective experience in lieu of a more objective analysis does not in any way devalue my writing or make it less applicable to other gamers.

That is the point of this blog, at least for the most part. To document my experience of games. Any lessons I learn from games, I want to do so by first viewing games as art that is interactive in nature, and think of the systems of those games as what creates my experiences in them, but not as the core experiences themselves.

And so my plan is that every game I play, I will write down my story of playing them. Maybe sometimes I'll lose interest early on and I'll talk about why the game failed to capture my attention. Maybe I'll play for a long time and write a review about why I intend to play more. Who knows where this will go, but I hope it's at least an interesting ride.

I'm also learning Japanese and might like to occasionally post about language and my journey in learning--maybe even occasionally writing in Japanese.