I’d like to start with a quote from this article.
“You see what this has become? It’s not just a trivial game to be played in an idle moment, this is a genuine battle of good versus evil. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or Jedi Knights or any of the fluff that surrounds the game’s mechanics. I played by the ‘rules’ and he didn’t, that makes me the ‘good’ guy and him the ‘baddie’, but this is real, in the sense that there’s no telling who’s going to win out here. There’s no script or plot to determine the eventual triumph of the good guy (that’s me, five health), there’s no ‘natural order’ of a fictional universe or any question of an apocryphal ultimate ‘balance’. There’s just me and him, light and dark, in a genuine contest between the two.”
I think that, in many ways, perhaps the reason we put so much into games isn’t because of what they give us, but what’s outside of them. There’s something about the game that surrounds the fabric of who we are. They reflect, in some sense, our effort in life, and our willingness to contort ourselves to the lack of logic of any given system. Now it’s true that it’s easy to give meaning to how the rules give any game structure or status or challenge us in some real way, but I think that what they give us is a story to tell. Despite the inherent conflict in competitive games, in some ways games give us a sense of release, a way to compartmentalize meaning into something understandable on a visceral level relating to the spirit in which we act.
This is commonly referred to as “Moment 37” in videogames. Effectively, it’s a moment of brilliancy in videogames that will likely be remembered forever, or at least as long as we still remember what videogames are. But perhaps what is more heartening, rather than the spectacular comeback, is that on some level the comeback is less important, perhaps, than the way in which the comeback is performed. The moments of extreme performance that are shown by brilliant players of games, such as Bobby Fischer, seem to be important more for their realized performance.
If we are to map this somewhat onto real life, it’s interesting how while everyone expected the United States (in 2001) to easily dominate the terrorist forces in various countries in the Middle East, the actual execution was flawed or, at best, poorly executed. Thus, the performance becomes the key ingredient to what seems to be memorable, and whatever associated practices are necessary to be at that point. Memory is somewhat fickle in this regard, and while there are many stories of underdogs coming back to win games, there are few that find themselves articulated often. The scenario then, the setup, seems to make games exciting or disappointing (the same is true of much within war–the writers of history write often of the unexpected, the triumph of the underdog, or the failings of the greater power).
Inherently, there seems to be desire built into finding ways to set exciting situations up, yet the reality is that setting up the system in such a manner is impossible or at least, improbable. Despite this, with even the possibility of showing refined play, we will play games, some for their entire lives, to find these moments of refined play, to find novelty. As a result, games give us a way to experience something unfulfilled, something waiting until the right, unknown series of parameters are found, something desired but not normally accessible in the day-to-day situation. As is explained above, there’s no cosmic order to help us with many of the problems faced in our lives, and thus, we find moments of clarity, we find a piece of reason, we find ourselves searching for these moments elsewhere, often in the games we play, where the universe at least seems like a structure we can understand. Being able to understand that small piece allows us to grasp something bigger, in both triumph and defeat, for both the underdog and the seemingly sure thing.