It Takes a Village (To Win a Video Game)

Video games have been a part of my life since I was seven and my parents bought a Sega Master System for my brother and I. And while I've never considered myself more than a casual gamer, there hasn't been a year of my life that a console hasn't been in my household. Video games have been more constant (if not prevalent) in my life than, say, the Internet.

I think I'm very far from being alone here, yet this recent article on gaming cultures around the world had me rethinking our own gaming culture here in America.

A list of common (read: mainstream) connotations with gaming in America through the 1990s might read like this: consoles, computers, indoor kids, obsession, nerds, etc.

Has that been eradicated? Altered? If our opinion of gaming culture is centered on WoW which is equivalent to D&D...then our culutre's mindset has not grown with its gaming.

Part of my answer to this is that gaming is everywhere. How many millions play fantasy football? How inundated is our market with sports? Now certainly there's a visceral difference between playing a sport and playing a video game, but are their more similarities or differences between playing fantasy football online and WoW? The difference is in our culture mindset. Why else was it called fantasy football?

Several decades before fantasy sports existed, Robert Coover penned a provoking novel called The Universal Baseball Association. The protagonist created an intricate baseball league run by the rolling of dice, but more than the doubles, triples, homers, and strikeouts were the mythos that he created. Certain teams had distinct personalities, as did players, who retired to own bars or write songs about the league. The protagonist lived in the world of his league rather than his own.

That obsessive mentality is readily ascribed to Warcrafters, but fantasy sports do something very similar: they give players a sense of ownership and a sense of fantasy.

Ownership: In MMORPGS, players create their own avatar, accumulate rewards, trophies, equipment, etc. In fantasy sports, players choose their team name, select their players, choose their starters, etc. Have you ever been in a bar and seen a guy celebrating not because his home team is winning, but because someone on his fantasy team scored a touchdown? All the time.

Fantasy: It's easy to undercut fantasy in this context by applying it to WoW? Of course that's a "fantasy" world. But what about The Sims? That's a fantasy world based on the mundane.

Why do housewives read romance novels? Why are series such as Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean such smashing successes? We like to indulge. We need to indulge our minds. I read an improv book once that said that the best stories show the world as we wish it was, be that mundane or fantastical, be it a book, or a movie, or a play,

Or a game. With deeper and better narrative coming to games (but really all the way back to the base hero stories like Zelda and Mario), gaming is a fantasy with an interactive element. It's not passive. I think WoW's fantasy brings so many people in not because they can be fantastical, but because so many people are indulging in the same make-believe world. Think of it as a Neverland effect: the more people that believe, the more true it becomes. When you have hundreds of gamers working together to do something, there is something very real about it. There are stakes.

I was thinking about this in relation to a soccer game I've been playing lately, FIFA 2009. By myself, I can win almost all the time. With my roommate, we win most of the time. Playing with four people on the same team (as we did last night), we struggled to win at a much lower difficulty setting, yet the experience was much more rewarding.

Why? Not just the shared experience but the shared fantasy that we were winning something together. And that's something our entire culture--not just gaming--can build on.