The original quote, from an MTV interview, sounds vaguely esoteric, but the article goes on to highlight a certain arch mystique that games still have in comparison to film or TV-- we use those media for entertainment, but there are also films about mundane things-- say, airline safety-- and TV shows about other TV shows, films and literature. Ian Bogost, who did the feature, goes on to note that, to date, the design goal in gaming has largely been the flashy blockbuster, the fantasy escape, and asks: Do we need more boring games?
The article highlights DS hit Brain Age as an example-- certainly, it's not a very exciting game, comprising little else but sequences of arithmetic chores that people persist at because they believe it's keeping them mentally sharp. The jury's still out on the great brain-training game debate, but even if these games are the biggest psychic whetstones in existence, it's less immersive, less stimulating on an emotional level, than any game where the objective is only marginally analogized or abstract. The real reason, debates aside, that the media is interested in games like Brain Age is because they draw a new audience; my Mom would play this while waiting for her potatoes to boil; I could see anyone killing time sketching numbers on the subway commute-- after all, they already do with notebooks crammed full of Sudoku. As the article notes, even Shigeru Miyamoto's suggested that Brain Age succeeded where all of his wildly popular and colorful brainchildren have failed-- it inducted his wife into the gaming hobby.
Is it possible that Brain Age and its ilk are successful because they're boring? Because they demand little of us, integrate seamlessly into the background of our lives, like those short television ads that play over the stairwells of some subways, or films used to educate prospective jurors about their civic duty? And moreover-- do we want games to continue developing this way?
On one hand, nobody likes the idea of our beloved medium being hand-tamed for the masses. Lots of us have spent years, after all, feeling vaguely excluded-- if not from some social circles, at least, we've felt that there are large segments of our verbal and emotional lexicon accessible only to other gamers. After all this time, perhaps we've become a little protective of our secret society; we like the idea that it's mysterious to others. It'd be great if more people enjoyed, talked about, understood video gaming-- but not if gaming has to change to make that happen. We like the idea of non-gamers evolving towards us-- not the other way around.
Yet, as Bogost asserts, "if we think of the possibility space for games as a more complex, graduated one, in which many kinds of experiences could be touched by games, then many more kinds of innovation present themselves." Moreover, if a broader spectrum of gaming experience was universally available in society-- if there were, for example, an airline safety video game-- we could perhaps better appreciate those designs that fall squarely into our corner.In other words, in this era where design, development, graphics and overall stimulation play "top this" with one another year after year, perhaps a few-- or many-- boring games, utilitarian games, are exactly what the industry needs. In a broad gradient with room for virtually limitless degrees of stimulation, wouldn't it be possible for everyone to get more precisely what they want-- and appreciate it, too?
It's a salient point; games are currently divided into genres based mainly on the mechanics of play, not on the nature of the experience, as films are. But "how to play" is forgettable; the games fixed in our memory hold their position because of the way we experienced them-- it was silly, cool, intense, emotional, disturbing. Filmgoers are much more able to get what they want out of that medium-- they go into the theatre, or the rental store, knowing that if they want an emotional experience, they'll grab a drama. When they want to learn, they pick a documentary, and when they want to laugh, they hit the comedy section. Games, on the other hand, have two basic primary arenas-- the design elements, encompassing design and controls-- and the experiential elements, comprising graphics, story, and music.
The goal: Make the design as accessible as possible, and as for experience? As stimulating as possible. Period. There's no spectrum that can be used to specify the experience emotionally or cognitively; it is, or it isn't. "Boring" is perhaps the exact opposite of what developers and designers want to achieve-- but by providing a counterpoint, a black to the white, perhaps a "boring" game is an essential step in the right direction, so that a range of colors can someday be represented in between.
We might fear that a domesticated, drowsy breed of game that belongs to my Mom, or to Mr. Business Man, or to Paris Hilton, might somehow make gaming belong to us less. But look at it this way-- if they can make a game exactly for them, then they can make one exactly, precisely, not for us, but for you.
