Digging Deeper - Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media? - Extra Credits

how much of your last gaming experience do you remember I mean like really remember not just the plot or the boss fight how much of the momentto moment play can you really vividly call to mind now do the same experiment for the last TV show you watched or maybe for the last book you read notice a difference I've run this experiment with dozens of people and time and again I found that minute for minute people can recall so much more of other media than they can of games and it got me it got me asking why why time and again even when dealing with totally disposable television shows that were of no higher artistic quality than the games people were playing could people recite to me in much more Vivid detail what happened on an episode of TV than in a game people could recount television events with such detail like uh let's see one detective mentioned to the other to circle around the back and then he shouted freeze police and kicked in the door and the room inside was this trashy drugg Den with like three dealers in it one of them went for a gun but the detective got the draw on them and took two of them out but the last one ran for

the back and then the camera cuts to him being arrested by the main character's partner who circled around the house earlier and that's a pretty decent amount of detail but when those same people tried to remember a recent gaming experience I'd get statements like let's see I fought my way through a bunch of rooms then I found a rocket launcher then I fought through maybe two or three more rooms and then there was a boss fight we weren't retaining the details for Recollections of a 30-minute TV show I'd get a far more intricate picture than I would from 30 minutes of gameplay this bothered me at first I thought it was something to do with the nature of interactivity were we in fact distracted by the fact that we had to interact that we had to actually play these games that really worried me because as a Creator I had to ask myself was it even possible for games to become the medium I believed they could be or for people to get out of them all that I thought they might if they can't even recall the details of that experience the next day how are we supposed to deliver mechanics as metaphor if people don't register the subtleties in the mechanics how are we supposed to give deeper meaning or provide more for the player to dig into if they don't retain the very element

that make such things possible so I went back and I tried to find an analog where else could I find something interactive that people did that I could test how much they retained it had to be something that changed every time so it wasn't just something they'd memorize like a play so I talked to a few of my friends who do improv comedy and a few more who do improv Jazz and the results kind of blew my mind now mind you my sample was woefully small but among those people they actually remembered their interactive experiences more vividly than passive entertainment like television but again not their games so okay good interactivity isn't the inherent problem at least that's a relief so I went back to the drawing board I asked more people about their gaming experience and listened more closely I realized that it wasn't that they were just discarding all the details rather it was that their memory around games in general was incredibly spiky they would describe an hour of play with a few Bland sentences and then talk for 10 minutes about an incredible boss fight or a heroic moment in multiplayer I think it was typified talking to mobile players they would play a 35-minute match and only be able to say a 100 words or so about the the whole thing outside of a few key moments

where they could take 10 minutes describing something in precise detail which took only about 45 seconds to play out on the battlefield all right so this was strange I briefly wondered if it could be that the majority of our gam playing experience was actually mind-numbing filler that we put up with because the high points were so great but I don't really buy that even in the multiplayer games which most exemplify this pattern of patchy memory as a player I know I'm often 100% engaged and paying close attention to everything that's happening so what was it frankly I know but I have a guess I think we've been trained to think of games in a fundamentally different way from books and television and music I think even when we engage in those other Arts simply for fun we're usually open to the possibility of getting more from them how many times have you looked up song lyrics to try to better understand a piece of music that moved you how often have you taken a character from a book or from a film and really pondered what made them tick and thought to yourself I'm going to try to be more like that but I think with games we've been trained to tune that out and I think our industry is at fault to some degree with with the way we've marketed and

positioned games as an adrenaline rush or a child's Pastime but I also think the public perceptions at fault like okay the other day I was riding the ferry and I found a certain Beauty in the syncopated Rhythm of the engines but most of us don't hear it and not because we can't but because we're not listening for it I think the analog is true for games I think a lot of the time we're just not listening for it so how do we overcome this well Comics had to do the same thing at one point and we saw the feedback cycle that happened as people started to accept that we could get more out of comics than just Escape fantasy creators were able to put more into their Comics which led to people getting more out of those Comics which in turn LED people to look for more in comics without which some of the greatest works of the medium could never have come to be could we have had Sandman or the Invisibles in the 50s era comic industry with the 50s era comic audience I would say no there was a level of understanding and examination that the creators needed to be able to count on from Their audience before works like those could come about and this cycle resulted in better comics for everyone whether it was the evolution of Batman or the Green Arrow or even pop works

like Powers The increased literacy and receptiveness of the comic audience gave comic creators the ability to deliver work at an even higher level than before making Comics a better medium overall so how do we do that well the first step is on us as players I think we can start trying to observe more and think more thoroughly about our games even when we don't feel like they may warrant that level of examination and some people might say you're overthinking things when you do that but I bet Alan Moore got plenty of that when he first pitched the idea for Batman Begins and Mark Miller probably got his share when he talked about how interesting it would be to explore Superman's character with red Sun next we need a better way to talk about the medium even among designers there's no real agreement on the semantics of what a mechanic or a system is there's no language for our routine conventions and that needs to change finally we need to apply the lessons we learn from our games to our lives there is value in thinking more thoroughly about anything books Games music but the True Value comes and taking the insights we've gained from our diligence and letting them inform who we are and what we want to be I just hope we actually

oh hey Dan sorry I just I let myself in I hope that's okay for anyone I haven't met hi I'm Mike from idea Channel which you might recognize as the show that looks like this anyway the thing Dan that you said about mechanics is something I've been thinking about a lot like if it is harder to get the meanings or implications or even story of a certain game could that be because of how we have to learn to play it and then that becomes what it is about Scott did you leave the door open I guess I'm asking if every game is also about its mechanics sorry uh I'm already interrupting you but maybe after this video is over we can go talk about this for a few minutes over on idea channel on camera um uh all right sure it's not that I don't like this version of me it just feels squiggly squiggly sweet see everybody in a few minutes over on idea Channel what just happened

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