Why do we play?

Games have taken over — more and more people are playing online games, computer game stores are everywhere — even the local supermarkets and discount stores have game kiosks to sell the latest games. EverQuest has 430,000 people paying $12 US a month to play, and some play 40-60 hours a week!

How has the computer tapped into our greatest need for play and laughter? What childhood impulse are we uncovering in the flickering screens of racing cars, shooting galleries, and complex dungeons?

What are we looking for?

How can we analyse games to better understand our basic needs for human interaction and reflection?

I wandered about in the rain on Friday, down long stairways that convicts built on cliffs to save themselves from precarious ladders, searching for the artspace on Cowper Wharf road.

The venue was hauntingly appropriate as about 40 scholars, gamers, electronic creators and art and game enthusiasts gathered in a cavernous warehouse turned arthouse on the Sydney docks for the Ludic Moments conference. As the rain poured outside and the art installations chimed and whined, we huddled in a large space and stared at the projectors to explore how academic communities are embracing games and game studies.

Games are simulations of reality — a rich field for study

Computer games capture the attention of millions of players both online and offline. Increasing numbers of people are developing two lives: one played on a shadowy screen as separate and distinct from their "in real life" identities. The question for game studies is not what is the game, but how is the game constituted socially and spatially? In Espen Aarseth's impassioned plea to study computer games, we saw how games provide the perfect interdisciplinary object, a new independant field, or several independant fields. Games have so many aspects that they cannot be subsumed by any existing field or department (such as aesthetics, culture, technology, media). Yet every existing field can benefit from studying games as multi-user games are tomorrow's social interfaces. While all programs contain simulations, games are a Universal Turing Machine that simulate scenarios and situations, enabling researchers to immerse themselves in games and use these games as gigantic social and aesthetic experiments.

I could not help wondering if it would be better to spend time actually analyzing games and drawing these insights than to draw the academic lines in the sand.

However, several other participants provided quick, tantalizing glimpses into the realm of games and game study:

• Sue Minor provided the history of first person shooter games, and discussed the evolution of game communities. Quake gamers, for example, have developed a cooperative, close knit community with social rules. Gamers exploit the hard coded rules of the game, but have strict etiquette of game behavior, particularly in clans. (This theme was taken up and expanded in the DAC conference as people explored the communities in online games like Everquest).
  
  
• Melanie Swalwel explored the comparison of the recent TV coverage of the Iraq war to a computer game. Television spectatorship is in some ways game-like as experiences are felt as real. Like games, tv provides interface which can be entered into. It is possible to be on both sides of the screen — both material and representational.
  
  
• Patrick Crogan discussed Espen Aarseth's theory of eporia (a non-road or roadblock) and epiphany (a way to understand the solution and get therough the roadblock) in terms of interactive games. Technology has a double time that anticipates a deadly future to control the future and does so from a past full of experiences — and lethal experiences — that provide information about how to deal with the future challenges.
  
  
• Josephine Starrs showed ways that artists are working in the language of games and showed some amazing games.I got a chance later to play with Dream Kitchen — an interesting turn on first-person perspective and choice.
  
  
• Simon Ryan and Brett Nicholls discussed how simulations function in the feedback loop of game play and how we arrive at our rules of negotiation in game space. Computer games are discourses on spatiality. These are not poor imitations of the real, but feed our understanding of space and orientation as we move through the game space. Decisionmaking and perceptual navigation are very similar in game and reality.