Never On Sunday

One of the TED lectures sings the praises of gamers and gaming. The central premise of the lecture is that enormous interest and enthusiasm is poured into games, and that we can solve the world’s problems if only we harness that energy by translating major problems like poverty and climate control into games—not so much for enlightening analysis deriving from the model (although that can be enlightening), but rather to focus gamers’ enthusiasm on the problem at all, from which attention solutions will spring.

It’s a flattering vision: Gamers Save World! Much more flattering than “gamers sit on ass playing Nintendo.” Unfortunately it depends on a vastly inaccurate portrait of gamers, far more incompatible with gamers as I know them than a gaming guru such as McGonigal has any excuse to embrace. To wit:

1.Gamers don’t give up, which is just what intractable technical and socio-political problems need.

Bullshit. Gamers give up all the time. When a game is too hard, it’s abandoned; maybe it’s tossed aside with a sneer for being “impossible,” maybe the gamer hides his shame by getting excited about a different title with the unmet intention of getting back to the hard game later. When a game’s interface is too inconvenient, it’s abandoned. When a game is boring, it’s abandoned. When a game offers little or no control over the outcome, it’s often abandoned—although a self-selecting portion of gamers actively seek out such can’t-fail “interactive stories” over proper games with win and lose conditions.

2.Gamers presume a solution to apparently intractable problems exists.

Not exactly. Gamers presume a solution to apparently intractable games exist, because, barring a tiny handful of experimental titles with a message to offer, solutions to games do exist. They’re made that way. Losing every time, no matter how clever or careful you are, isn’t much fun, and doesn’t build a customer base—not since the days of Pac-Man, at least, when it was necessary the player lose eventually and pay another quarter to keep playing. Indeed, almost all games offer not only the chance to win, but the chance to win utterly and absolutely: conquer the entire world, reach level 50 and become king, collect every last star. Many games offer multiple winning strategies. The world’s big problems are not designed in such a way as to ensure that even a single winning solution exists, much less multiple solutions of unalloyed success.

3.Gamers tackle incredibly complex problems regularly, virtually every time they play.

No, gamers tackle problems of modest complexity. Sometimes. If they’re into complex management sims. If they’re into shooters and other games of dexterity, or if they’re into casual games like Bejeweled, not so much. And even the complicated spreadsheet games like Civ or SimCity are nowhere near as complex, nor anywhere near as difficult, as actual world problems. As noted above, gamers like to win, and will abandon games where winning is impossible. I’ll go even further: gamers generally demand easy and reliable victory. They like just enough challenge to force them to pay attention, but actually losing should be the product of gross blunder—preferably a series of gross blunders. Needless to say, the world’s problems do not offer easy victory.

To be sure, a lot of time and energy is poured into games, and harnessing all that attention to more significant challenges than helping Mario reach the coconut kingdom could achieve great things. I’m just not prepared to believe that games are the way to harness that energy. Nor am I prepared to believe that gamers have any more native talent, or any more drive, to solve problems than the rest of the world does. If anything, less. Games are primarily empowerment fantasies, an escape from the complexities and failures of actual problems in the actual world around us, where success isn’t nearly so taxing on our modest abilities.