So I’m basically destroying my gamer cred here – to the extent that I had any, which is probably precisely not at all – by admitting that until this week I hadn’t yet played Destiny.

Look, I just hadn’t, okay? Leave me alone.

(Don’t worry, it gets a lot worse.)

Anyway, I had some free time so I dove into the demo. Many of the more critical (in the more academic sense, not the “this sucks” sense) reviews I had barely skimmed said it was both beautiful and ultimately pretty soulless, which I found – at least from the demo – to be true. But I can get behind a soulless game. I can even get behind a “walking simulator with stuff”. Sometimes I want to Not Think About Things in a fairly aggressive fashion.

So I was having fun. I was running around shooting things from cover and knifing people in the neck and hanging out with a floating metal eyeball with the voice of Peter Dinklage. I was playing by myself, because almost without exception I play video games alone in single-player mode, because I don’t particularly like people (and among other things, in all seriousness, online co-op gaming is not a safe space for me and I shouldn’t have to go into why).

And then I got to The City (the last safe human city because evil aliens blah blah destroy everything for Reasons blah blah look just don’t think about it too hard) to gear up and head back out for more shooting and knifing, and…

Ugh. There were people there.

Quipping aside, it really was rather jarring. Other players were present in the space with me, their screen names visible above their heads. I think it was the fact that it was unexpected that was the most jarring, because if I actually went in knowing a thing or two about Destiny aside from the fact that it was supposed to be pretty and soulless I would have seen it coming (like… significant parts of it are massively-multiplayer environments and that’s sort of the point of the game; I somehow managed to go in knowing effing nothing about this game, it’s ridiculous and I have no idea how it happened and I am so goddamn ashamed of myself). But I’m interested in why else it was jarring, and I think it has to do with how I as a player interact with the gamespace in both an emotional/physical way.

For me, the significant thing was that I wasn’t forced to interact with any of those players, at least not there. I was free to ignore them, and I did. But they annoyed me. I was annoyed at them for being there at all. The space no longer felt like my space because I was sharing it with people, and I didn’t feel as though I had consented to doing so (HOW DID I NOT KNOW THIS GOING IN, HOW). The players themselves had avatars the same as my own, and if not for the floating screen names I wouldn’t have known they were other players at all. In terms of my formal interaction with the game at that point, nothing was affected and nothing changed. My active play wasn’t altered. I acted as I would have done if I had been there “alone”.

But I felt so differently about it. I felt disconnected. I felt thrown out of the world in which I had been slowly immersing myself. Simply by virtue of knowing those other people were there.

Among other things, I think this is evidence that – jumping off a debate about “formalism” in game studies that I’ve been reading about recently, though in certain elements it’s a fairly old argument – when we’re examining something like play in a game, we can’t merely adhere to what a lot of people would call a classic formalist approach to gaming: that what matters most in terms of the analysis of a game is what you do in it. When you’re not doing something, you’re not playing the game. Simply being stationary in the environment, listening to it and looking at it, isn’t actually engaging with the game at all.

So clearly a problem here is how we define doing.

If the only thing that mattered in Destiny was the logistics of how I ran around and shot things from cover and knifed people in the neck, the presence of other players with whom I was not obligated to interact in any way shouldn’t have bothered me at all.

But I interact with these spaces emotionally. I want them to be mine. I don’t like to share. To arrive in one and have that not be the case made it harder for me – for whatever bizarre psychological reason – to immerse myself.

I feel sorta ridiculous even admitting that any of this happened, but it did and it’s… Yeah, it’s a thing.

I knew this, of course. I know I interact in an active way with video games even when I’m playing Journey and I’m just standing there looking at sand and literally crying because the score is so beautiful. I’m present in that space, I’m experiencing it as as space, and in fact one of the reasons why I sometimes stop “playing” to look at and listen to things in the environment is because my interaction with the game has become so intensely visceral.

So I’m not really even saying anything new here. A number of game studies scholars have pretty much said all of this. It just hit me again, freshly: how we interact with video games is so messy and complicated, because we’re messy and complicated and often resist easy analysis. I came at the mechanics of this specific game (KNOWING NOTHING, HOW DID THAT EVEN HAPPEN) with my own specific way of being in and feeling in the space of a game, and my experience of that space was complex and particular to me. That’s suggestive about how we need to think about the ways in which players experience games… in general.

Ugh. People.

Sarah doesn’t like you on Twitter – @dynamicsymmetry