Sometimes I think about what a videogame must historically be. What anything with its existence determined based on the whims of electricity must be. Recyclable. It makes a coy amount of sense if you are willing to indulge a videogame’s inability to ever take up space. Uniquely interesting that the digital now takes up so much physical space in our world yet aside from it, takes up no space in our world. But the space they take up, aside from ever more fully controlling dreary reality to the whirr of electronic vim and vigor, is space we wanted them to take up. Namely, the mind.
A videogame is a recyclable moment, more so than any competitive sport primarily that of its inerrant re-representation of the same situation. Strange that we should be so enamored by a system we can control but whose inputs are never the same and thus the same board becomes infinitely captivating. The board is oddly fascinating as it represents our surreptitiousness to the machine, from fields of plays to lines where space requires a permit to participate. There the walking is difficult, there the lines are without grey area. Or is it?
What is fascinating about games is clandestinely that gray area. The matter we can’t touch but become raucous over, not so much the pertinent interest but the close-enough to call that anyone could call. And where does that line evolve for videogames? The point of sustained interest if there is a point on a line we are constantly chasing. Finding it eventually leads to competition, inevitably the crux of a long-surviving game. However competition fights also with creativity, for the art of design is tempestuous and the user remolding a creation into a new story for watcher and reader alike.
Creativity is perhaps the game all play. The game upon which all are entertainers and craftsmen. There are rules in all forms, spaces for almost all things. Yet the senses are often plagued by possibility and a videogame then is a deluge. Nowhere perhaps more potently has creation come and gone in shorter a period than videogames. The players and designers themselves continue to construct eras for themselves to explore, each more frivolous than the last, missing creativity for more reliable favors. These are short-lived indulgences chased by greed, and lost just as quickly. Sustainability rarely makes creativity sing.