Why Games Matter

23 October 2020

Do games help us form social bonds and build important life skills, or are they just a pleasant way to escape the daily grind? Worse yet, could playing games make us lazy and antisocial? These are some of the questions we’re asking in this week’s show, What’s in a Game?

I understand why someone might think games are a waste of time. It’s hard to imagine that all the hours I’ve spent playing Q-bert (great game, by the way!) have done much more for me than help me while away some empty moments. In fact, you could even argue Q-bert has been bad for me: games like that are addictive, and they keep us from socializing with friends or doing something productive and altruistic with our time.

Still, I think there are good arguments to be made for at least some games. Even Q-bert may be minimally beneficial, strengthening my hand-to-eye coordination. (Not that I’m likely to find myself in a situation where I’m leaping diagonally onto a launchpad to avoid a bouncing snake, but I digress.) Other games set us fascinating puzzles, giving a little workout to our problem-solving muscles. Or they allow us to become a different person, exploring alternative options for life. And don’t get me started on improv games—I can say for certain that they’ve helped me to be more creative, courageous, and collaborative.

Some games even have moral ambitions. The Walking Dead keeps track of the choices you make and then feeds them back to you at the end, inviting you to learn something about the depravity of your character. Meanwhile, Brenda Romero’s board game Train—a kind of artwork, which you can only play at game shows—puts you in charge of a railroad system and tells you how much cargo you need to transport to what destination using your trains. At a certain horrifying moment in the game, you turn over a card that says the destination is Auschwitz. That’s when you realize what the cargo is—and what you yourself are capable of.

Let’s not forget, either, the social aspect of games. Games aren’t just me on my phone playing Q-bert; they’re groups of us getting together to play pickup soccer, improv games with friends, Mahjong with the family, or role-playing games with people from all over the world. We collaborate, we compromise, we deliberate together, we solve collective action problems. If kids pick up basic social skills from Red Rover or Hide and Seek, it’s not crazy to think that adults can pick up more advanced social skills from softball or Risk.

None of this means that everything is rosy in the garden of games. Monopoly, which was originally designed to teach the evils of capitalism, never works that way in real life. (My brother always used to steal from the Monopoly bank; now he’s a hedge fund manager.) And sometimes collective game-playing goes badly: the world of sports is full of cheating, harassment, and violence. Fellow Brits may remember footballer Eric Cantona acrobatically kicking a fan, or Roy Keane saying he had deliberately injured an opponent with a career-ending tackle. Americans may think of Tonya Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly injuring Nancy Kerrigan’s knee. That was about as much a “compromise” as Don Corleone’s negotiations with the Tattaglias.

But still… Even in the world of professional sport, there are more inspiring models of behavior. Federer and Nadal, Venus and Serena, Evert and Navratilova: we can respect our opponent as a worthy foe, not as an enemy. We’re grateful to them for trying to beat us, since they’re helping us to raise our game. If we can carry this wisdom with us when we leave the court, we are truly winning the game of life.

Our guest on this week’s show is Thi Nguyen, author of Games: Agency as Art. I hope you can join us for some fun and games!

Image by FelixMittermeier from Pixabay

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Comments (26)

RepoMan05

Friday, October 23, 2020 -- 5:18 PM

Personaly, i use games to

Personaly, i use games to think. Thats to say, dual think. Training myself to multitask. Im able to change how much attention i can divert from my thought process to the game at any time without any real consequence.

RepoMan05

Monday, October 26, 2020 -- 9:13 AM

Its said games help you

Its said games help you stretch your imagination and in ways this can be true but for it to actually be true you have to want it to be true. Many games offer you a delightful psycotic state you you can relax within the confines and absolutes that borders the games edges. They encourage you to adapt to a safe little world where you can complete repetitive tasks and gain new rewards. In ways, they isolate you from reality and shutdown your mind to the complexity of reality. Game can be incredible learning tools, indoctrination tools, isolation tools, and propaganda tools. In the end, games privide you with whatever you want to take away from them and its completely up to you how you want them to act upon you.

Zoospec

Saturday, January 2, 2021 -- 1:30 PM

Abstract games are a way to

Abstract games are a way to avoid reality. The only practical benefit is a therapeutic effect. Those who play real world games with real goals do not need to waste time for abstract goal games.

Harold G. Neuman

Friday, January 28, 2022 -- 4:13 AM

This blog entry and the one

This blog entry and the one before it deal with art and games, respectively: 'what if we had no art' & 'what' about games? I'll keep this brief. We have such faculties as creativity and imagination, allowing---no, compelling us to exercise our intellect. I submit that, were these faculties non-existant,, that contingency would suggest we possessed no intellect, or, one very different to that which we do have. In such case, we might not even be asking the questions or could be asking different ones. It is pretty rhetorical and speculative, seems to me. But, we like to think that way, especially if (or when) we grow bored with art. And games.