The Problem of Games

For the past two weeks, I've been replaying the Phoenix Wright games. This ongoing activity came from a weekend drive to Las Vegas for a show with my band. I had learned from our previous mini-tour around California that of the three of us, I'm the best suited for the back seat - our guitarist is the only person who knows where we're going, so his spot up front is required, and our bassist suffers from crippling sleep apnea, so any time in the back seat is a battle of wills to stay awake or slowly choke himself to death. As a consequence, I needed something to do while in the back, unable to hear a goddamned thing, and a DS game seemed the most reasonable time-killer.

Replaying the games (I started on the second, since the first was loaned out to a friend) rekindled a desire to enjoy gaming as a mental activity. I'd been binging on WoW, which mainly appeals to me when there's a clear path of personal progression, but that fell apart. So a game that offered the chance to actually make me stop and think about things was a refreshing change.

This has been a growing trend in my leisure time, coupled with the resurgence of adventure games in the marketplace. Monkey Island, and various other Telltale products, have given me a chance to explore games in the way I grew up -solving problems, and feeling the gratification of a solution well-earned. It factors into other elements of my life, but being able to spend my free time working through a problem statement, and being rewarded with some bit of story on top of the satisfaction is really what I enjoy from the medium more than anything.

It's made me think about how I might explore other gaming genres that I'd previously written off as being mindless. The FPS comes to mind, though not as a whole - but it seems the good ones offer that same sense of mental challenge that I really crave. BioShock first enraptured me, to turn the phrase, before revealing that I actually had to stop and think about not just how to get through the level, but what tools to use to defeat the Big Daddy standing directly in my path. I balked, because I felt my lack of skill with the first person perspective made the process unfulfilling, but I'm thinking about revisiting the game with a new tack on the same idea.

The most obvious form of FPS that is really all about puzzle solving is Portal, which I regret never finishing - this is one of the many games on my To Do list. I suppose my lack of enthusiasm is in part because I know the ending, but I'm motivated now to take another stab at the game, for that same sense of personal accomplishment that was always more apparent in the traditional point and click adventure. Adventure is a broad word, after all, and shouldn't be limited to one particular interface.

This blog is part of an exercise with two purposes - one is to get out of the house, because I just bought a laptop and despite the fact that it's a freaking monstrosity, it seems like the desire to be mobile is inherent in its design. The other is to practice the discipline of regular writing, at least in a free-form sense, for its own sake. I used to write at length about everything that came to mind, mainly while I was an intern and felt that there was no better use of my time while wasting away in a bullpen. But now I have a real job - excuse me, a career - and don't have time during the day to wax verbose about whatever thoughts I might have, and the tragedy of the thing is that I feel like I have no thoughts anymore. But clearly that's not true, so we'll give this regular "blogging on the town" activity a whirl and see how long it lasts, and what benefits it might reap.