Created by Kym Buchanan | http://KymBuchanan.org | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Birthday: September 16
Complex means...
...undecipherable, enigmatic, cryptic, puzzling, perplexing, bewildering...
Games are enigmatic "texts" to non-gamers. Many games may essentially use the same problem spaces (e.g., rooms and corridors) or the same operators (e.g., joystick). But to an inexperienced user, these things are undecipherable. Further, just as it's difficult (impossible?) to learn a language from a dictionary, play is best learned through playing with others, not reading an instruction manual. Jim Gee and others describe gaming expertise as a kind of literacy, on the basis of this line of metaphor. Players, especially adolscents, use gaming literacy to create and defend private subculture(s).
...tortuous, sinuous, meandering, anfractuous, flexious...
The challenge and anxiety of games are desirable to players. The gaming community rejects games that are too easy. Sometimes the path to victory in a game is meandering, a journey that crosses and recrosses familiar ground. Sometimes the path is even counter-intuitive, but a good player reads the signs the designer leaves and finds the way. Great games allow multiple solutions. Yet if the signs are too obvious, the most meandering path still feels like a sterile chute, lacking the choices and risks that drive satisfying gameplay.
...obsession, fixation, mania...
Video games pose a risk of addiction: the interactivity creates a perfect, isolating feedback loop that can keep a player obsessed. Our society is struggling to classify games as healthy or unhealthy, a dichotomy that the complexity of games renders untenable. In this sense of complexity, games invite mania (e.g., did Doom cause the Columbine tragedy?), so players and non-players need to practice moderation in their behaviors and habits of mind.
Created by Kym Buchanan | http://KymBuchanan.org | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.