Early in “Games Without Play,” David Golumbia talks about Role-Playing Games and First-Person Shooter Games, and he offers the observation that “Despite being called games, these programs allow players limited choice” (184). He says this following a discussion of children’s games, namely hide-and-seek, in which children have notoriously changed and invented and ignored rules pretty much as part of the play. This made me think about Joe’s comments about Mountain, and how he found it captivating to enter a world in which [he has] limited agency as a player.

It seems to me that, for a while, the player exercised a great deal of agency in the first video games (or, rather, all of the agency that was required in order to accomplish the game’s objectives). I’m thinking here of early games like Pong (which Golumbia talks about), as well as the games that I grew up with in the 1980s – both home console (e.g. Atari 2600, Intellevision) – and arcade-style games like my personal favorites, Frogger, Elevator Action, and Ghosts and Goblins. In these games, there were prescribed actions and play was limited to presses of a button and movement of a joystick. Very simple games. I stopped playing video games when they became complicated – right around when games started requiring combinations of button-presses and combinations of joystick moves. When the home consoles came with controller pads that included six or eight buttons and arcade-style consoles comprised four or five buttons and joystick-move combinations. Maybe I’m just lazy. Or simple. Or both.

And so but Golumbia points out that even the modern games that I consider far more sophisticated and intense/intensive are essentially playing with the same principles as earlier games. In the Half-Life and Halo series’, for instance, “the player can do almost nothing but kill living human beings and creatures. While the player has a limited number of choices as to which entity to kill at any goven time, the extermination plan is itself rigidly determined” (185).

So, clearly, I’m wrong about video games becoming more interactive and complicated. But maybe not. Back to Mountain, and the other games for this week:

I freaking LOVED Mountain! For about ten minutes. And then I hated it. I grew frustrated at how little there was to do. I’m impatient by nature, and I became increasingly annoyed that there just Wasn’t. Anything. To. DO! I liked the ambient sounds at first. After rotating things and watching the clouds and trees and rain and darkness falling, I just let the game play in the background. Then it became annoying. This led me to ask, what’s the point of any of the games for this week? I couldn’t be further from Joe in this regard (and this probably says a lot about my inability to think conceptually), but, Stick Shift just seems monotonous, and Hurt Me Plenty, while ostensibly educational for people who, frankly, must be mentally challenged if they need this game to educate them about how not to sexually abuse someone, is fleetingly cute. Queers in Love at the End of the World, though, is at least engaging. I think Joe compared it to a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, and I think that’s accurate. It’s fun, though, because you can’t possibly answer the questions in the time allotted, so you have to devise a strategy and play the game several times.

I confess that I did not play the DepressionQuest game, but only because I suspect that I have some issues that I’m not exactly willing to confront.And so back to Hide-and-Seek… When I was a kid I had a group of friends with whom I would play Dungeons and Dragons. We never knew the rules – we just made up our own, like Golumbia’s Hide-and-Seek players. We would make up our own weapons, vehicles, etc., etc. I’m sure that, to any serious RPG people, we would’ve been seen as blasphemous. Still, our version of play was quite different from the structure promoted by video games being developed at the very same time. Also, there was no version of “winning,” at least not in the sense that Golumbia talks about winning (186).

I’m not sure what to make of this, and I’m really looking forward to talking about it tomorrow. I’m actually a little disappointed that, tasked with next week’s “Week in Review,” I won’t be able to participate in the discussion.

That said, I think I will close this post with the observation that, as an adult, it turns out that quicksand and hot lava aren’t nearly the existential threats that my eight-year-old self expected them to be.