Metaphors We Game By - Part II

If you haven't already, be sure to read part one of this article first. It sets up the concepts I refer to here in part two.

Lets go back to ‘systematicity’, and the entailments of the GAMES ARE COMPETITION metaphor. These are, I’ve claimed:

GAMES CAN BE WON OR LOST

GAMES ARE ENTERTAINMENT

GAMES HAVE RULES

I would argue that how closely a game adheres to these entailments influences its reception within the video game community. For example, Mortal Kombat (2011) was criticised because its final boss, Shao Khan, suffers from ‘SNK Boss Syndrome’. This is when an enemy character is difficult to beat because they are able to do things (such as unblockable attacks) that other characters are not. Shao Khan is therefore difficult because he breaks the rules of the game, and players reacted poorly because this deviated from the entailments of GAMES ARE COMPETITION, which is key to their concept of what a game is. Compare this with a game such as Ninja Gaiden. Universally seen as extremely difficult, Ninja Gaiden is nevertheless warmly received because its challenge is fair. Gamers don’t mind the game’s difficulty because it sticks to its own rules, and is therefore in line with the metaphor.

The question, “what is a game?” is the subject of on-going debate in the video game community. If we examine titles whose status as games is controversial, they often have something in common; they are not titles that we talk and think about in a way that is consistent with the GAMES ARE COMPETITION metaphor. When analysing a game, the entailments above work like a checklist. Titles that flout some or all of them are more likely to be judged not to be a game. Let’s look at an example from the indie space.

 

Mainichi: game or not? (Picture: Mattie Brice)

Mainichi is a simple, affecting game in which Mattie Brice tries to convey some of the embarrassments and frustrations she regularly faces as a mixed transgender woman. Though Mattie’s sharp writing is entertaining, Mainichi constantly flouts all the other entailments listed above. With no rules, there is no way of winning or losing, and therefore no competition. Nobody would say that they had ‘beaten’ Mainichi, or that it was ‘too hard’. Mainichi is a better example of the alternative metaphor, GAMES ARE PRESENTATION, or perhaps even a different one altogether: GAMES ARE MESSAGE. You might therefore hear people talk about Mainichi using phrases like:

Mainichi says interesting things

Mainichi speaks about the experiences of a mixed transgender woman

Mainichi carries a lot of meaning for me

What’s interesting about Mainichi, beyond its thought provoking subject matter, is the disparity in responses it elicits from gamers compared with non-gamers. As Brice noted in her #1ReasonToBe talk at the Game Developers Conference this week, non-gamers called Mainichi inspiring, and said it changed how they looked at games. However, game-studies students complained that Mainichi had little gameplay, and didn’t consider it a game at all. I would argue that this feedback was to be expected because gamers, unlike their non-gaming counterparts, come from a culture where they are used to talking and thinking about games as competition. Since most people would struggle to see a title where the main aim is to meet a friend for coffee as competition, gamers didn’t even see Mainichi as a game. Non-gamers, unaffected by the influence of the metaphor, did not come to this conclusion.

Let’s go back now to Lakoff and Johnson’s concept of ‘hiding’ and ‘highlighting’. If we accept that GAMES ARE COMPETITION is the prevalent metaphor in video game culture, we accept that it obscures aspects of gaming that my suggested alternative, GAMES ARE PRESENTATION, would emphasise. However, I think that this might be changing, at least in part.

Above I discussed how I would talk about Sonic 2 as a kid. Although today I still describe games today with phrases like ‘it was too hard’, there is one important exception. I wouldn’t normally talk about ‘beating’ a game anymore. At the end of a modern game, I would instead say I had ‘finished’ it. This new phrase ‘hides’ the concept of competition to an extent. Although games still include challenging moments, in this small way the language I discuss them with has come to ‘hide’ this aspect. This is because reaching the end of games has become easier.

Finished is an interesting word. You wouldn’t say that you’d ‘finished’ a film, but you may say you’d ‘finished’ a novel. It suggests overcoming something, but not the direct confrontation implied by saying you ‘beat’ it. When you read novel, the obstacle you overcome is the need to invest time and intellectual energy to reach the end. Games have always required an investment of time. However, where in the past they also required battling with difficult opposition, they now require gamers to deal with a comparatively gentle challenge. This is because modern games are designed to be finished. With developers concerned about scaring off potential players, things that previously contributed to a game’s difficulty, such as finite lives, have become rarer, decreasing challenge accordingly.  It’s therefore no longer appropriate to say you ‘beat’ a game because there was never a question of the opposite outcome occurring; the developers designed the game with you reaching the end in mind.

However, in the golden era of arcade gaming, you ‘beat’ a game if you completed the final stage, but you ‘lost’ you if ran out of money or gave up trying to do so. It was appropriate to say you’d ‘beaten’ the game if you reached the end because it wasn't designed to let you. It was designed to clean you out. Furthermore, the concept of ‘finishing’ a game didn’t exist in early video games. Though you could sometimes ‘beat’ the game, you could rarely ‘finish’ it. Instead, the end of the final level would usually loop right back around to the first, often with a bump in difficulty to boot.

I’m not saying that games are no longer challenging, but I do believe the challenge they offer has decreased over time. Unlike when I was younger, I expect to complete most modern games in three or four sittings. I believe this is why my use of language has changed. By using ‘finish’ instead of ‘beat’, I portray myself more passively as a player. I am hiding the competitive aspect of completing a game and highlighting that I have come to the end of a presentation by the developer. GAMES ARE PRESENTATION, then, has begun to vie for space with GAMES ARE COMPETITION as the metaphor that informs the way I think and talk about games.

There’s much more to say about this topic than I could fit into two posts. I’m sure there are other metaphors people game by, and there are other angles from which to examine the ones I’ve already discussed. Hopefully, by unpicking the metaphors that influence the way we talk and think about the games we play, we can gain an interesting insight into why we think the way we do, and in turn broaden our horizons in gaming as a whole.

Reference

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1980[2^nd ed. 2003]), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press

@ludolinguist