As a part-time gamer, I admit to sometimes losing myself to computer games. In fact, I have just spent the holidays getting totally absorbed in some of them. And of course, it was only because they were so much fun - especially to play online games with friends.
I have also reflected on the gaming experience itself, and I thought, perhaps what is fun about it is not that gaming is an effortless activity. Games are fun not simply because they let you be lazy. They can actually be quite demanding - even if not physically so - as they require our time, energy and concentration. Easy games can quickly bore us. And despite how much a gamer can be lazy in real life, he often does give his best while playing his favourite games.
However, we are not that far mistaken when we think playing games are fun because they are easy to do. But what is really so absorbing about them is that they let us believe that we can achieve great things with only a little amount of effort. So the lazy hypothesis is not that far off after all.
For all kinds of games that we play - on the computer, boards, cards - we may have the illusion that we are in full control of how we want to play these games. Whether to move the pawn or the horse in a game of chess, for example, we think is our decision. But it is not.
As the saying "The house always wins" has always reminded gamblers, never mind how good you are at playing cards, and no matter how lucky on the slot machines, the casino will always get your money eventually. That is because card games and slot machines are designed to let you believe that you can win a lot of money for very little effort - even if you never do.
We might also unashamedly generalize our thoughts on gaming here to other sports - I mean the really physical ones like football, or tennis. Of course, we have always regarded sportsmen to be the shining exemplars of hard work. Footballers and tennis players must train hard for extensive periods of time, that we can never mistake them for average video gamers.
But looking beyond the physical aspect, perhaps we can compare sportsmen to gamers. After all, don't all sportsmen also believe that they can achieve great things with little effort. Of course it is not easy to actually play professional football, but in the end doesn't it all comes down to kicking the ball past the goal posts? You score a goal, you win the match, money and fame.
Scoring a goal gives such a rush of great feeling, even for the spectators. But after all those manic celebration, can someone remind us what a ball kicked into a net has achieved for all of us?
Alright, don't let me spoil your party. Even so I think my point is still valid. It is our nature to find the easiest way to get the most valuable things in life - be it picking the right number in the lottery to win some money, placing the pieces in chess to win some honor, or kicking a ball past the goal posts to win both money and honor.
The irony is that we end up spending more time and effort than how much we thought we would in playing these games and sports, only because of the illusion of how easy it would be to achieve the things we wanted through these activities in the first place. I can run a business, kill enemy troops, and build an empire, only with a few clicks of my mouse. But all I have done was to waste the time and energy, that I could have used to achieve those things in real life, in front of a laptop screen.
Well, borrowing Nietzsche's words, I'm only human, all too human.
Once i helped my mom gardening. I said," why are u planting thorny plant, look it pains to remove them" She said,"we cannot have fun without pain".
ReplyDeleteI replied," i didn't endure pain playing video game"