Video Games

Childhood

My earliest memory of video games is when I was four years old, 2007, watching my father play The Neverhood. I bugged him to let me try it, and he did. While it’s not much in gameplay or puzzles, the visuals were striking. To this day, that little floating island with the ladder underneath the map is etched into my head. There is something awe-inspiring and terrifying about it. I think it appeared in my dreams a couple times.

I got a Nintendo DS when I was six, and a Wii when I was nine. Around that age, I had a funny idea of how games worked. I thought they were like interactive slide shows, where the disc contained all possible images of gameplay, and your button combinations move through the slideshow to the correct images. Sometimes they’d forget a few pictures, and when the game encounters a missing picture, this causes glitches and crashes.

My interest developed when, at the age of ten, my dad came home with a stack of Hyper AU magazines from the 2009-11 era, that the local library was throwing out. I loved them. I would pour over all the screenshots, the magazine design, all the funny articles I read over and over again. My favourite articles were the ones of the gentleman gamer, a feature about five awful trends in gaming, and of course the reviews. This was the heyday of inFamous and Bioshock, so there was a lot of talk about games with ‘ethical dilemmas’. My all time favourite article is a piece by the prolific Dan Staines comparing ethical dilemmas across games, discussing what makes them effective, the problems with the new ones (mainly, that they were binary choices between good and bad, and often inconsequential), and some examples of good ones from Ultima and Mass Effect. Though we view game journalists on the same level as tabloid writers, Staines was a serious thinker and writer on games. Altogether, these articles developed my appreciation for the industry behind video games, how games are designed and created, and what makes for a good game.

Around this time, of nine or ten years of age, I had my first expression of interest in programming. I wanted to learn C++ for some reason; it’s possible I’d heard that most games use it. It was a triumphant failure; whatever guide I was using failed to give instructions on how to install and use a compiler, so I couldn’t run anything I wrote, so I lost interest.

When I was eleven, I watched Indie Game: The Movie. Edmund McMillen and Johnathon Blow became my childhood heroes. We had Scratch as part of our ICT curriculum in school, so I tried making games with it. I made a friend who shared my developing interest in making videogames. We planned to learn GameMaker and open a game studio together, but after primary school we went to different high schools, so this never came to be.

High School

I finished my first proper game when I was twelve, using the obscure Adventure Game Studio. It was for an activity in music class where we had to do an open-ended project related to music, that we’d present to the class. I loved open-ended projects, that let me shove my extracurricular interests into my schoolwork. I picked ‘create a board game’, but convinced my teacher to let me make a computer game instead. It was very simple. You began in an outdoor area, and could walk into a room full of instruments. There were standard point-and-click adventure interactions such as speak, interact, etc. which gave you information about the instrument. It was tough because Adventure Game Studio uses it’s own scripting language, information about it online was sparse; though there is now a manual, this was made in 2018, two years later. Also, I’d forgotten about this project until the night before I was supposed to present it, so this was my first all-nighter! The class was not impressed (I don’t blame them, it was terrible), but my teacher thought it was great. Regardless, I was hard on myself for how it turned out, because it was quite shoddy. If I could say something to my young self, it’d be that you did well considering the time constraints (albeit, of your own fault), and the total lack of information about AGS scripting, leaving you to trial and error what works; many adults could never have figured this out.

Through my junior teen years, I made lots of small things using GameMaker Studio and written GML. Mostly experiments in collision detection and basic physics. I made a couple top-down adventure games. We still used Scratch in our IT classes. Because of it’s ease of use and facilities, I did a few novel game experiments with it, such as a top-down game where you guide a fast high-inertia rocket past obstacles, and a spirograph-like project.

My big problem was that I lacked the wherewithal to see through a project long-term. Anyone who has done a significant project can attest that staying the course is a skill in itself. The programming was not so important to me yet, as it was just a necessary part of my goal of making a game.

When I was in Year 9, I applied to take the senior computing class (VCE Computing) in Year 10; note that taking one senior class a year early is very common among students as a way to manage their workload. Computing did not run due to low numbers however. I realized then, that if I want to learn ‘serious programming’, it was completely up to me to teach myself. My school couldn’t do anything to teach me. This realization was a turning point where I became really fed up with school, because I felt my own goals clashed with the path school set out.

I begun reading Programming Principles and Practice in C++ by Stroustrup, because by now I’d figured that video tutorials were a terrible way to learn. Most of my GML knowledge came from reading the GML documentation and trying to make it work, so it was more familiar to me. In time I forgot about making games, because I found I enjoyed programming for it’s own sake, far more than designing game mechanics or making visual assets.

I’ve neglected to mention that, of course, I was playing a lot of games as well. My hours and regularity ramped up from when I was a kid, to the point where I was gaming every day for a few hours at least, sometimes losing a whole day to a game. I played mainstream titles like Fallout 4 and Overwatch, but as I got older I played more games like osu!mania, Rimworld, Factorio, and Zachtronics games. Maybe it’s because I spent a lot more time playing video games than making them, that I made such little progress.

A Change In Attitude

In my reflection now, I notice that I always had a lot of ambition, even if I usually didn’t achieve my grand goals. As a child, I wrote novels, though I never went far with them. I went through the same thing as a teenager making games. The desire to plan great projects was constantly present in my life. From thirteen onwards, there was no period of time I wouldn’t at least claim I was working on some game or some song, as I also made a lot of music in this time. But it was obvious to me that my progress was bad, so I was often disappointed in myself.

Dabrowski says: “The feeling of inferiority toward oneself is one expression of the process of multilevel disintegration, and it arises from the greater self-awareness and the self-examination that occur in multilevel disintegration.” In multilevel disintegration, which happens naturally in pubescence, the structures of the psyche become loose and can be changed, for better or worse. I was experiencing an ongoing crisis about my projects, and feeling constantly dissatisfied. This would lead to some radical changes to my attitude once I hit my last year of high school. I began to think very critically about my life, and about video games as well. I realized that games work by giving the player a way to satisfy desires for achievement, control, and power — all inter-related concepts, yet distsinct — with a trivial effort. The proportion of work to sense of achievment is always lopsided compared to the real world, even in mentally demanding games like Factorio or the Zachtronics games, where you are closer to engineer than player. This is a problem because it makes it difficult to chase actual achievement when simulated achievement works just as well. We think we can tell the difference because we can consciously tell reality from simulation, but we cannot tell emotionally. If we could, we would not be upset by the death of a beloved character, nor feel joy for their victories. In Tynan Sylvester’s book ‘Designing Games’, he describes a psychological theory that we have a basic state of arousal, and we project emotions onto that arousal based on our senses. If you meet a tiger in the woods, you experience high arousal; our eyes tell us there is a tiger there, and that causes the arousal to be interpreted as fear, thus we make the decision to run away. It follows that if we can become happy or sad by media, that media can create arousal, and that any feeling can be projected on this arousal by the right simulation. Thus, games can create arousal we interpret as achievement (which they often do because this is ‘good game design’), which feels real to our emotional mind.

In my final year of high school, I didn’t yet know Dabrowski’s theories, nor this one Sylvester talks about, but some elements of this rose out of my intuition, in my self-criticism. I properly confronted the idea that video games have been holding me back, and could continue to hold me back, from achieving what my real goals were. If I didn’t fix this, I felt I would forever be in a state of making grand plans that I never carry out, and be in a constant state of self-deprecation. These thoughts took up my mind so much, I could not ignore it. I begun my new project of cutting video games out of my life. But it is hard to drop something that’s always been a part of your life. Consider how difficult it would be for the average person to cut social media out of their lives, and this is somewhat close to the difficulty I faced. But, not only was it an addictive activity that was part of my life, I felt like it was tied to my identity. But it was so important for my growth to cast it off, that I must sever it from my identity; moderation was not enough.

The first step I took was I changed my Steam password, deleted my account, and threw away the password. In some days when my high spirits against the crusade dipped, I felt idiotic that I’d done this. Tried to recover it, but of course I’d planned this so I wouldn’t be able to. By the next day, the regret was gone.

Still, I would still ‘snap’ and go fire up some games and get sucked in for a while. The period with which this would happen widened from days to weeks to months, and the time I’d spend decreased from a couple days to just a few hours of one day. Usually, it happens when I’m in a motivation slump, which seems to happen cyclically, but I get back up quickly now. The most recent was about four days ago, and lasted less than two hours before the hedonic treadmill of video games bored me.

I feel glad for the choice I made. If I was still playing games often and using social media, I’d be incapable of focusing on university the way I do. I’d also like to add a point, though it doesn’t quite fit in my overall picture, but is important. I have personally met two other guys in the last year, of a similar background of life-long gaming, who have completely forgone the hobby as I have. One of them is, in fact, the aforementioned boy who I planned to open a game studio with, who I bumped into a few weeks ago. This suggests this reformed attitude is spreading, in some minor way, across many people right now.

Reflection

I was a pretty bad student in high school. I did well enough to be in advanced classes, but barely. I always put playing games, as well as my extracurricular projects, ahead of my schoolwork. Yet, I know that goofing off the way I did is not just partly responsible, but wholly responsible for where I am now. If I wasn’t playing video games, I wouldn’t have wanted to make them, thus I would not have been programming. My programming skills were about all I had going for me to get into university, and my excellence in computer science was what let me transfer to engineering.

If I’d just studied in school, I could’ve been able to get into university the same way everyone else does. But would it have been the same? My pursuits helped me discover this thing that I not only enjoy, but also excel at, and can provide a real value to society with my work. School wouldn’t have helped me with that, I know because all my software classes in high school were terrible. I owe my position as a future engineer to me knocking off schoolwork to fix segfaults and learn my flip-flops and adders.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this way to people. I jeopardized the opportunities given to me when I was young, throwing them away with immaturity. It was by narrow luck that I was allowed into university with the grades I had; I feel genuinely grateful that RMIT University gave me a chance that has changed the course of my life forever.

There is a time to relax, and a time to work. A time we are young, and a time we grow old. Though it’s an inconsequential pastime to many, video games were deep for me, and all the more reason why it was so huge for me to give them up. It was ultimately, what I knew was the right thing to do to achieve my real, nobler goals. I do have a lot of nostalgia tied up in them; what is nostalgia good for? Very little in my opinion, but this is a different matter. All I’ll say, is I’d rather look forward to where I go than relive what passed, in which there is nothing new to be discovered.

All that said, should I ever have some gap of time where I have nothing to do, maybe I would make a game. Perhaps it’s stubborn disappointment that I never finished one of my grand visions. I am the kind of guy who would do it just to prove that I can. I still respect the medium, especially where it involves puzzle design. I still get an interesting idea here and there that takes up space in my head for a little while. For now, I keep it all at rest, and focus on what I have in front of me now.