Learning to use the Power Button

A popular opinion has begun floating around the net, making its way into the brains of gamers who like to think more than they like to play. These gamers enjoy games the same way you and I do, for the most part. The difference is that these gamers have a hard time meeting all of the challenges popular games present them, the same challenges that you and I fail everyday. But there's a difference between this gamer and us. When this gamer fails, he gnashes his teeth and begins to construct why this and that is a poor design choice in his head. This player needs some explanation for why he can't succeed. He grinds away and finally pulls through, but his ideas are settled, this is no longer fun, and it certainly hasn't been. These gamers are everywhere, writing and talking, and now they've begun to discuss the challenges presented in games as though they are slavery.

This slavery manifests itself in a couple of different ways. The argument I am most concerned with complains that game designers are forcing us poor gamers to complete various unnecessary challenges, many of which resemble work, for measly rewards. These gamers feel that games are monarchs, who command them to complete absurd and arbitrary challenges on a whim. These poor gamers are tragic victims really, victims of plastic discs.

This argument strikes me as alarming. To me, bemoaning a game for supplying you with challenges is to yell at a chef for giving you food, to kick a dog for fetching a ball. You can't knock a game for giving you a challenge. Even beyond that, to call these challenges "work" shows a staggering lack of perspective. Why are games work? The argument reads: because they are a set of goals that are difficult for you to complete, are menial, and are accomplished for no significant material gain. Much like every hobby known to man!

Why do people play music? The act of playing music is one of the most easily equatable activities to playing games that I know of, and any musician will tell you: in order to play music with any skill at all, one has to practice. Besides dreams of becoming a professional, is there any reason at all to play music well? Or by extension, practice? No practical reasons, but there are too many amateurs with fine musical abilities for it to be "too much work".

Any hobby or activity you can name becomes work if you look at it though the right(wrong?) lens, because all activities involve challenges that a person must work to overcome. But does that mean that all activities are work? Maybe it does! Maybe that isn't such a bad thing. In the words of George Santayana, quoted in Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: "Work and play...become equivalent to servitude and freedom". Did you catch that? The only difference between work and play is that one is at the behest of your boss and/or your stomach.

So if work and play are nearly indistinguishable, this becomes a matter of freedom! Are we free when we play games? Is there any way to escape the commands of our ruthless dictator? I think there's one, if I remember right. Something on the front of every game console. You use it turn the game on, and I believe you can (At any time you choose) press it again to turn the game off. Our savior: The Power Button.

That's all there is to it! At any time you can liberate yourself from a game, because of the most important characteristic of games:

A game, of any type, is a voluntary withdrawal from the rules and goals of the world, in favor of the more simplistic rules and goals of the game.

This feature alone makes the argument about games as work ridiculous. Games may resemble work, but not only is that not a concern(Some studies have found that people are actually at their happiest when at work), but it's also clearly false. If at any point the player has lost interest in a game, or doesn't want to complete the challenges laid before them in it, they can turn it off, and play another game. Or maybe switch to a whole new activity! You can't do that with your job.