In my last post, I wrote about taking risks for the education you need. Then, when I started thinking about my relationship with video games, and their potential educational merit, one thing was clear: rarely does one take risks for the sake of video game “education.”
This professor once advised me on being a writer, and recommended a path he had taken to get a summer’s worth of classical literature education: “have a marathon.” The idea was to find a summer with little to do, and do nothing in your spare time but read. The list of books was, of course, inexhaustible, but of course included works like the Odyssey, Lolita, The Bible, etc.
Now imagine having a summer marathon of game education. Can you imagine taking it as seriously? Taking notes here and there, spending just enough time with each game as needed, and not getting too involved or lost in a particular game? Maybe, just maybe, it’s entirely possible. And you could really, truly learn something valuable from it.
But in the meantime, when you’re living and enjoying yourself, you’re having the “gaming experience” much like you’d be having the “college experience” when you’re outside of classes and studying. And while the act of gaming can be valuable in an academic or cognitive context, I’d rather focus on the experiential one. Because while there’s value in viewing the artistic merit of games, we can also learn a hell of a lot just by experiencing them, experiencing the gaming lifestyle. Even in a college-bound, academic life, there’s much about the college experience that can be much more valuable than a 15 page essay on controlling metaphors in fiction.
So, hey: let’s talk about that experience.
I think it’s safe to say that every quarter-life crisis I’ve had at this point (I’m almost 30; yikes) has involved my deeply imbedded gaming habit. Sometimes it was inspired by the annoyance of whomever I was dating at the time, but mostly (i.e. 95% of the time) it was me having issues with myself.
Whenever I had these phases, these “crises,” I felt I was incurable when it came to the problem. Even when I had class essays that could easily be written about gaming, I opted out as a means to become less involved with the hobby. Whenever I was single, I wouldn’t even touch a console, dreading the idea that gaming would make me less interesting to any potential candidates. If I got depressed, I worried I’d get too sad about myself if I played games.
Eventually, I of course wizened up and realized that games are pretty much the best thing ever, and that I absolutely love them and adore them to death and would have a million babies with them. I eventually learned all the productive resource management I was doing with these games, as well as becoming literate in semiotic domains and such. But most importantly, I learned to relax and just have fun with them. To stop worrying about it and see gaming as an extremely valuable way to spend my time.
I keep finding new ways to love games, new ways to connect with them. The other day I was playing Demon’s Souls, a game in which players mostly play separately but can leave notes on the ground to help other online players. I had so much fun with this — the valuable notes were very helpful, while other notes were beautifully rude (“jump off this cliff for treasure!”). Another day I was playing LostWinds, a beautiful, serene and smart puzzle/platformer, and I felt this very strong relationship to the designer of the puzzles, having all these pleasant “I see what you did there” moments when a puzzle made me think. And yet another day I was at a pub when I jumped on one of those tabletop Ms. Pacman games with a friend. Two people I knew to the left of us started getting in a fight about something silly, and we just smiled at each other, completely immersed in our game and its twitchy action.
It was beautiful. All these moments are. And it’s amazing that something so remarkably pure, something that can be a source of so much joy , could ever bring about regret.
Whatever your definition of education really is (the O.E.D. cites education as “training in a subject” and “an enlightening experience”), gaming sounds like an education for me.