“What do my science fiction stories have in common with pornography? Fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world, I’m told.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
One of the most interesting and useful angles with which to examine any art is that of what it offers, what needs it sates, and what desires it anticipates. Games are an interesting form: One of the foremost needs they seek to sate is that of challenge, which means that they have to frustrate the player’s desires in the most satisfying way possible, to maximize the satisfaction of solution, of overcoming the challenge. This alchemy of push and pull, give and resist, shows up in other forms in less direct ways: Music teases with the promise of resolution, building tension and discord only to release it in angelic concordance, and visual arts obscure and abstract detail to reward a careful viewer. The art of satisfaction is fundamentally that of frustration overcome.
As game developers we don’t really work to directly frustrate the player, directly create the push and pull, but work to create a world and a set of rules that are likely to generate that outcome. We build the dungeon, place the traps and enemies and resources, determine the behaviors of those traps and enemies and resources, and hope that the overall flow between these is such that the player comes away just frustrated enough to find joy in their eventual victory. It is, rather than the impossible hospitality of the Kurt Vonnegut quote, an impossibly hospitable hostility.
The transition between these worlds and the one we live in, consisting as it does of an almost impossibly hostile hospitality, can be quite jarring. A particular thought that cannot escape me, straddled as I am between the two worlds, is that the latter is every bit as intentionally constructed as the former. Certainly the physical rules our world operates under are not as flexible — we cannot so easily redefine gravity, for instance — but the laws of money and of ownership, the laws of power and of vulnerability, these are man-made, built to incentivize and shape behavior in much the same way as a game does. So, examining the art of humanity, the art of governance, the art of economics, we must ask ourselves the same questions we do of all art: What does it offer, what needs does it sate, what desires does it anticipate?
These questions are far too wide-reaching for me to tackle here, if I even thought myself capable of satisfying their demands, but many have asked similar questions and will continue to do so, positing diverging theories of varying utility. For my part, I’m fascinated by how and where these intersect with the arts, and specifically with the art of game design. There is a fascinating propaganda implicit to the form itself: With a game, we can suggest the idea of a malleable world with malleable rules, a world that is what we choose to make of it, rather than an unyielding and grinding status quo. The existence of this plastic world suggests the plasticity of our own — and, though we do not yet know how to mold it or what shape it must take, the sense that we must grasp and shape is surely growing in urgency.
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