This Is Game
— 2023 New Year's Resolution
My 2022 ended with a day of game. I am convinced that I am not to blame, because yesterday was also the first day of my break after a long period of intensive work. Notwithstanding the recreation, how games make us become ourselves slides into my mind.
A superficial argument is that games lead us to explore the limitation of our vocational ability. Here I assume playing a game can be classified into a vocation, but actually in our real life, it is. Spectators adore dedicated athletes with marvelous movements, so they should have been staggered by the ingenious operations of game players as well. For such reason, games have created billions of dollars in gross revenue for a wide range of groups.
The foregoing argument is soon defeated by the thesis of futility (无用性) of games, which is indeed an assault weapon against the non-professional players in particular. Irrespective of the fact that games play a role as psychotherapy for many ordinary players, denunciation of games can always penetrate under the help of amusing ourselves to death. Game players have been in the teeth of the storm.
Since the past 5 years (from 2018 to 2022), I have been holding that it is more the science and techniques behind games than games themselves that have endowed games with the respectable status today. As long as I demonstrated the fruits got by peeking at the disassembled code behind a game, most of the snobbish and troublesome critics could go away. To be morally correct, I could even announce what I am doing is all about data science. Perfect.
Definitely, that is not the ultimate explanation. It could not answer why games are prosperous, and why players are dedicated. Honestly, commercial activities have provided ample opportunity for games’ prosperity, and dopamine (多巴胺) has pushed players into the sea of temptation. Nevertheless, we must not ignore the communities of various games. Behind the fancy frames of a game, there may be thousands of unpaid developers, either players or non-players, devoting their hours to the game. In this scenario, games are not graveyard of fighting will, not amusement park for the stray, and not the seam connecting our life with real world knowledge. They are works with condensed enthusiasm and vigor from thousands of, even millions of people.
Straightly speaking, games are the first type to inspire people to work without mandatory constraint. The way that people live and work could be changed by games — imagine that people worked unpaid but they harvest more. This may not be immediately intelligible, but we can have a vision of a world in a game. Who would be the first one to live there? If you wish (or hope), you should start your work, or you could only play the Earth Online. Till now, never reckon you have owned a real game that could count as a world.
UnnamedOrange
3:00 a.m., Jan. 1st, 2023
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