
Nels Anderson recently pointed out a post over at Jamie Madigan’s Psychology of Video Games blog. While Madigan’s post does not really say anything new (and is based on the kinds of experimental social scientific research that went out of style in the 1960s – sorry, couldn’t help myself), it does bring up the most important unanswered question that we have as gamers: Why do we play video games?
Nels takes us a large step in the right direction towards understanding this problem when he observes (in his own response to Madigan’s post) that, “We need better ways to talk about what makes games enjoyable.” Gamers, I’ve found, lack articulacy when it comes to understanding our own experiences playing games. Sure, we can go on for hours about what we like/dislike about the game’s rules or design, which characters we found empathizable and which we could not connect with, or how “immersive” the world is. But that’s not the same as being articulate about our own experiences and what they mean to us. Speaking articulately about ourselves requires some kind of language to put things into perspective, especially when it comes to sketching out what makes playing games so darned enjoyable.
Towards that, I want to play with the idea of “mastery” that both Madigan and Nels mention, and how mastering a game is its own enjoyment.



Into my first 10 hours of Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura, I’m already flush with gold. My gnomish gunsmith, despite his commitment to doing only good deeds in the world, has a silver tongue and he’s already bedded one of the girls at Madam Lil’s (a bawdy house) in Tarant for free. He struts around Tarant with not a party of likeminded adventurers, but groupies attracted by his charismatic charm.



This is a short response to
Gamers are notoriously bad at dealing with loosely-termed ‘art games’. Myself included. With the recent releases of
What You’re Saying