It may only be a Wednesday, but it's still a good time to wax philosophical(ly) nonetheless. A friend is staying with me for the month of January. More often than not, he's got his head in Second Life (as do I). If he's not there, Perfect Dark's on the Xbox 360. The other evening we suggested that, instead of playing a computer game, we play a game "in real life". Out came the board games, cards and odd puzzle pieces from the dusty shelf.
We played a game called Tantrix, a puzzle-type thinker apparently similar to the board game Carcassone. Here was the shocker which took us all by surprise: we had to think for ourselves. There was no little icon to tell us where to go. There was no automatic replacement of a tile if it was put in the wrong place. The rules of the game had changed - we the other players were now the software which had to tell Jay where to go, rather than relying upon a bunch of 1's and 0's to do the job for us.
It was a funny realisation, particularly because of all the pro-game literature which argues that playing interactively helps with lateral thinking, criticism and cognitive development. Sure, versus the television or DVD player - i.e., more passive entertainment - games do cause more neurons to fire and connections to be made, but they still have a never-wrong ruler to make final decisions, thus removing the player from a level of active decision-making.
There are more and more hand-slap games (as I like to call them) being released - those that don't let you do something, or send you back to the start of a level if you've done something wrong. In both scenarios, the game punishes you without really explaining why. According to research conducted by Sheri Graner Ray for her book Gender-Inclusive Game Design, this is a particularly male approach to gaming. Interestingly, women tend to enjoy games in which they challenge themselves indirectly, thus the success of casual games in that demographic. Indeed, watercoolergames recently reported on a forthcoming study by PopCap, inspired by users commenting that playing the games kept their minds sharp.
Are mainstream game companies realising that their audience is inherently lazy and producing titles which provide direction rather than inspire deep thought?
Sure, this doesn't apply to all games on release today - and the proof for sharpness-of-mind comes from my recent thrashing at board game Risk by two people who forever have Advance Wars on their DS's - but playing an offline game again reminded me that much of the strategy in computerised entertainment, even in open-ended games, is out of my hands.
I think I'm going to start playing more board games.
