Something that’s become a bit of a refrain for me here is stories matter – in one way or another I think it’s popped up in just about everything I’ve written about. I’m sure it can come off repetitive, but there’s a reason I keep flogging that particular horse: first, it’s one of the things I hold most deeply and personally true, and second, it’s surprising to me sometimes how many people don’t actually seem to grasp it. At least not in all the situations to which it applies.

I’ve been writing a lot about games recently, you know my favorites can be found at Spielesnacks DE, and a lot of people have been talking a lot about games. It’s one of those cultural moments. For a variety of reasons I’m not going to go into much more detail than that in this post, except to say that there are intense emotions wrapped up in games and those emotions are extremely apparent right now. Someone outside this particular subculture might be baffled regarding why people are feeling things so deeply about games.

To be sure, a lot of this isn’t actually about games but about other things: social change, cultural and systemic social inequality, economics. But I don’t think you can drag games out of the equation. Why dream jackpot games? Why do they matter so much to some of it, in and of themselves? Why do we care so much? Why do I care so much?

And I think, if there’s bafflement – or even if there isn’t – we need to be clear about what games actually mean.

I first started writing about games in an academic manner in college, and what kicked me into doing so was actually Erving Goffman’s 1974 doorstopper Frame Analysis. Goffman talks about a lot more than games – Frame Analysis is obviously not a book on video games or even game studies – but what he does say about games is deeply insightful and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, still somewhat under-utilized as a set of theoretical tools among people who approach games from an academic perspective. In a 2009 paper/extended abstract, Sebastian Deterding lays out the basics of a Goffmanian approach to video games:

[We can] theorize video gaming as a “frame”, a social convention consisting of mutual expectations organizing our experience and behavior in relation to a specific type of situation. The shared “framing” of a situation is stabilized via the self-correcting interplay of attention (what “belongs to” the situation and therefore should be attended to), interpretation (what the phenomena attended to mean) and action (how to act and react appropriately in relation to the situation and meaning of what is attended to) between the participants. The “boundary” of a frame is effectively determined by the “joint focus of attention” of the participants, supported by meta-communicative cues (“brackets”) that mark the spatial and temporal beginnings and ends of the situation.

In other words, games are spatial-temporal situations in which normal “rules” by which we engage with the world are suspended and new rules put in place, depending on what all the participants agree on. Because Goffman – and Deterding – are talking about rules. Maybe not formal rules, and in the earliest forms of the play of children these rules usually aren’t formalized. But there are specific ways of engaging with the world of a game in the space of a game that are meaningful and appropriate by mutual agreement. There’s a logic, and it’s not necessarily the logic of the world outside the game.

A game is a thing. What we do in the space of a game is play. Play is an act by which reality itself is put on hold and something else is slotted into its place. We (pretty much) all play. It’s one of the first things we do as new humans. Any level of play requires some very rudimentary element of imagination – you need that in order to suspend these normal rules. And humans aren’t the only animals who play.

This is where we need to step back to 1938 and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga‘s book Homo Ludens, “Man the Player”. According to Huizinga, culture isn’t a prerequisite for play, and for the most basic forms of game. Play pre-dates culture:

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

I have two cats, and they play all the time – I knew one of them from earliest kittenhood and watched her playing with her siblings. I’m not suggesting that kittens possess the imaginative capabilities of a human child, or that kittens have the capacity to create something that we would generally recognize as a formal game. I’m also not a cat psychologist. But I do think, when animals play, that we’re seeing a very simple form of the rule-suspension that underlies all games. The pretense of a kitten’s game, when a kitten is playing with another kitten, is I will hunt and stalk and fight you like prey or an enemy but you won’t really be either of those things. It’s not necessarily conscious. As far as we know, cats don’t possess a human level of self-awareness or self-reflection. But I look at it, and I see something familiar. I see something I used to do, as a small child. Some of my first memories.

So: stories.

We’re storytelling creatures. We engage the world through narrative; we construct stories about it and our place in it, we make sense of who we are through the establishment of a self-narrative that continues until we’re no longer cognitively capable of maintaining it, or until we die. One might argue that the moment we can tell any kind of story is the moment we become human. That stories are culture, in that stories allow for the understanding of this happened, then this happened, then that made this happen, and now here we are. And also here is where we might go. Stories allow for coherent temporal thinking and the capacity for the same is a prerequisite. Through stories, we engage ourselves, and we create meaning around everything we see.

I argue that play is one of the ways in which we first learn to tell a story. I will hunt and stalk and fight you like prey or an enemy but you won’t really be either of those things is a story. It has a beginning and an end, and they’re defined and mutually agreed upon by the participants. They contain meanings that might be subtly different from the meanings we use to move through the rest of reality. We need to understand those meanings in order for us to play the game, and within the space of the game those meanings might be reinforced, or might even change.

Games are stories. Play is the collaborative telling of a story.

Play is also a way of telling a story that we can do alone. And I think the rules of a game, while they may not be complex stories in and of themselves, can be justified through stories, and can provide a framework on which a more complicated story can rest. As Jesper Juul writes in Half-Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds, “Rules themselves create fictions”.

(Note: Juul draws a distinction between a fiction and a story, which I think is potentially useful but which I’m pretty much jettisoning here for reasons I don’t want to go into in the interest of keeping this thing under 2k words)

Let’s talk about the Atari 2600.

My husband has recently gotten into collecting and playing the classic Atari games he grew up with. I didn’t grow up with these games, so I’ve been watching this with a good deal of interest, and learning some new things about the history of a medium about which I care a great deal. One of the things that’s struck me hardest is the juxtaposition of games that are incredibly simple, visually – we might be talking about a dot moving around in relation to a bunch of other lines and dots – and don’t in fact require stories for people to play them, with the incredibly complex and detailed stories that one often finds in the manuals. Rich narratives, sometimes some pretty extensive worldbuilding. The manual for 1984’s Ballblazer contains a multi-page transcript of a supposed play-by-play, depicting the game as an intergalactic sport. The Swordquest series was packaged with actual comic books. None of this stuff is necessary to playing the game, but the games as sequences of events governed by rules encourage the creation of complex stories. They move narrative from “this because this” to “this because history of this because these people and also this and this is who you are and you need to do this because this other thing.”

When I was a kid, I had symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested – among many other things – as highly ritualized sorting behaviors. While many of my other symptoms were painful and unpleasant, sorting was soothing to me. The orderliness, the fine motor control. I now understand these behaviors as games, after a fashion: there were rules, there was a focus of attention guided by particular logics and meanings. Over this framework, I constructed elaborate stories to justify why I was doing what I was doing, in the sense of giving the rules and the actions greater weight and meaning. It made the sorting more soothing, more pleasurable. It wasn’t necessary. But it felt deeply instinctive.

We tell stories because we can’t not. We play because we can’t not. So my point – finally – is that just as stories are a direct line to the core of who we are as human beings, games and play are much the same. Before we were human, we played. I really believe that we learned to tell stories in part from our play, that one couldn’t have happened without the other.

I have no proof of this, obviously, and I’m not formally trained as an anthropologist. But I think this is why games mean so much to us, or at least so much to some people who have formalized their relationship with games in a cultural sense, and have pinpointed games as things that saved them, that provided an escape and a sense of meaning and hope that hadn’t been there before. This is at the center of why games mean so much to me. Games are who we are, whether we’re aware of it or not.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when people care. A lot. Now we just need to figure out where we go from here.

Sarah plays on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry