Playing a video game involves more than just button-mashing.
Former Wellingtonian Pippin Barr started out nearly three decades ago playing computer games on his parents’ Apple IIe. Now a “doctor of video games” teaching game design at a university in Copenhagen, he has written the book on how to play a video game – properly.
It involves more than mashing the buttons on the game controller all at once, although plenty of games seem to actively encourage that approach. For Barr, each game, if well designed, has its own emotional truth. Getting to the heart of that truth is the reward after what can be a very time-consuming, although exhilarating, journey. A few golden rules are explored in this slim volume, one of the Ginger series of titles that also includes How to Drink a Glass of Wine and How to Look at a Painting.
Know your game genre, advises Barr. Are you playing a “platformer” like Super Mario Bros, where you see the characters side-on racing across a landscape of obstacles, or are you entering the realm of the “massively multiplayer online” like World of Warcraft, which has five million online members, tens of thousands of whom might be playing all at once for virtual gold? Each genre has its own playing style that must be learnt and honed for ultimate effect.
Get to know your avatar if you are delving into a role-player game like Final Fantasy. Your avatar is your representative in the game. You need to know, within the confines of the game, what your avatar can do on your behalf. You need to know what you want.
Explore the world of the game – every sniper-infested back street, every inch of that digital tennis court – until you are as familiar with it as you are with your own neighbourhood. Perhaps most importantly, offers Pippin, enjoy the space in games, which increasingly employ sophisticated storytelling techniques that “tap into what it means to be human”.
Lifelong gamers will smile at Barr’s references from the past 25 years of video games. Who can forget those hours in the arcade playing Street Fighter and Double Dragon, the joy in finishing the peerless Half Life 2, or the high-speed thrill of Gran Turismo?
Video games have become breathtakingly realistic and are increasingly available on mobile phones, TVs and tablets. But Barr, whose own games are incredibly simple, is less obsessed with the technology than the underlying meaning of video games, which he eloquently articulates here with humour and the insight of a true gamer.
HOW TO PLAY A VIDEO GAME, by Pippin Barr (Awa Press, $26).