Gamasutra Column: Why Stories Really Aren’t Important

I really do agree. I never really pay much attention to the story of a video game, nor do I really care if there is one or not. The gameplay and innovation are the tops of a video game.

‘A Journalistic Bent’ is a regular column in which our roving reporter takes a hard look at all the issues of gaming, games development, and the games themselves. This week’s column looks at games as a waste of time.“So you just sit around playing games all day?” That’s the reaction that routinely follows any attempt to explain my lifestyle to ‘outsiders’. Someone who plays games in their spare time they can understand, but someone who plays them for a living? Preposterous!

There was a time when I attempted to explain that really I was a writer who conducted interviews, researched articles, and spent many long hours being gently dessicated by my desk fan as I sat working on irreverent Gamasutra columns. But that time has passed. Maybe these people right: perhaps I really do just sit around all day just playing games.

Fortunately I’ve managed to justify this reprehensible lifestyle to myself in a number of ways. Firstly, I don’t play all day; I sometimes make tea or put the cat out. Secondly, I am able to justify myself thanks to the value of the videogame as a cultural object – to understand gaming is to understand an important aspect of modern life in all its rich diversity. I can listen to lectures featuring luminaries of the gaming and music worlds (12mb MP3) and feel the sense of intellectual arousal that accompanies moments of great insight and articulacy. I can even examine how games might well have saved my education – I largely passed my high school French exams thanks to a French-language copy of Dephine Software’s Flashback, for example.

But then I think back to the incredulity on the face of my interlocutor and realise that there is something else going on. They’re not just surprised, they’re concerned. Usually it’s because they imagine that my life is spent wasting away in a darkened room, twitching in the direction of a restlessness of pixels. For many people games still represent forgettable entertainment, distraction, and time-wasting. Surely, to play games for a living is to waste a life?

Inexorably I’ve realised my true self through the condemnation of these arched eyebrows and bemused faces. These people are right: games are a waste of time!

Lucky for me, then, that my psychology depends on just that fact. I would refer you, if I could be bothered, to an article in Will Self’s essay collection, Junk Mail. It is an essay about the slacker and the nature of slacking. In it he sums up my existence with a few elegantly sculpted observations on the nature of the slacker.

“[W]hat I most want to convey to you is that slacking is really quite different from other forms of inactivity. Your true and authentic slacker is not like a dosser, or a shirker, or a truant of any description. Indeed slackers are often surprisingly productive people. The reason for this is that the ‘slack’ itself, the actual head of inertia that the slacker builds up whilst doing nothing, is to the psyche as they stretched rubber of a bungee is to the bungee jumper.

“When the slacker reaches the very bottom of this descent into inactivity, he finds himself with an unconscionable amount of energy which has to be dispersed as quickly as possible. This is the only explanation I can come up with of how I have managed to do anything at all in my life.”

There’s more to this thesis. Slackers, you see, will require certain things to be genuinely idle. For many it is music, or cigarettes, or illicit drugs. Perhaps they lie in bed all day reading philanthropic literature. But I have found the true Grail of idleness: the videogame. Without it many of us modern slackers would never reach our full potential. We would never be fully idle and never find the depths required to drag us back up into hyper-activity. Without months spend pottering around in videogames, I personally would never get anything done.

And, with that explained, I’d best do something unconstructive. Perhaps I’ll have enough energy to lie outside in the sunshine.

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