Human To Do

Humans do things.

Humans do things for lots of different reasons.

We eat, drink, and sleep because our survival requires it. We go to work as part of a transaction to get things we need or want. We fix things that break so that we can keep using them. We rest so that we can continue to do things later.

But there are some things we do that don't have such practical, productive, or transactional value, but they still have worth, and that worth is inherent. There are things we simply do because we are human. It's human nature to do them, therefore they have worth. They don't derive their worth from productivity or practicality, they have "human worth." Social bonding is human to do. Learning and exploring is human to do. Telling stories is human to do. Making art is human to do. The list goes on. Doing these things requires no justification, because simply being human means these are the things you do.

To put it another way, suppose that through some hard-fought victories we managed to end scarcity and exploitation within your lifetime. Your food, shelter, health, and safety are all guaranteed with minimal daily effort. Nothing else requires your attention. What would you do with yourself all day? The things you would find worth doing after the world was fixed, the things you do when you don't need to justify what you do—these are the things that have human worth. These are the things that are human to do.

And if it's worthwhile enough to do when the world has been fixed, isn't it also worth doing now, if you have the opportunity? If we say that our goal is a world where people are free to do these things, but we demand justification when someone carves out time for these things right now, then we are hypocrites. Fundamentally human activities require no justification.

It is with all of this in mind that I want to talk about games, and how we relate to them.

To be clear, I am not talking about the broader concept of "play." Play is indeed very natural; humans aren't even the only creatures to do it. It's a very broad umbrella, covering pretty much anything done recreationally—one might even argue that it's not so much a thing to do as it is a way of doing things. By contrast, game-play is a specific activity. Play doesn't become game-play until you've opted into the constraints of a game: a set of rules that puts made-up obstacles between you and a made-up goal for no other purpose than to structure your play around them.

The playing of games has "human worth." Games need no justification, because playing games is simply human to do. It is therefore tragic that so many people try to demand that justification, and it is further tragic that the usual response is to try and offer such a justification (which in turn wrongly validates the demand).

Sometimes I see people demand that games be leveraged as a communicative art to send a message, that games must Have Something To Say. Others will respond that games should be allowed to not Send A Message, because they offer "escapism," a vital respite from a weary world. They will argue with each other about this or that game and whether it is sufficiently justified by Message or Escape. However, the argument of "which justification is enough" is itself invalid, because games have human worth and do not need justification.

Certainly it is possible for a game to send a message, or offer an escape to another world, or tell a compelling story, or provide beautiful imagery, or any number of other lovely things. Many games do! But they don't need to in order to be worth making and worth playing, because playing games is simply human to do. Games have human worth all on their own.

We see evidence of the denigration of games in other ways, as well. For example, a decades-old problem in the video game scene is that many people think of video games as needing to feel like movies in order to be good. We have culturally acknowledged cinema as a valid artform (but not animation, hence all the bad live-action remakes of good cartoons, but I digress), and thus video games must aspire to emulate movies—this is part of where the graphical fidelity arms race comes from. Although there's nothing wrong with a given game emulating movies, it's wrong to think games as a category need to do so. No artform's peak lies in the emulation of a different one, and games are no exception. Games have human value on their own.

Speaking of movies, our cultural disrespect toward games also manifests in a version of the "talking over a movie" problem. You see, even among innately human activities, nobody likes all of them in equal measure. This means that sometimes, for example, someone might join friends on movie night but care less about seeing the movie than about hanging out with their friends. The movie is effectively just a backdrop for social conversation, rather than an object of interest on its own. That's how you get people talking over movies. Thankfully, we have largely normalized the idea that such people have a responsibility to consider that others in the room might be interested in the movie itself: if someone talks over a movie (without making sure everyone else is cool with it first), it's widely accepted that it's the talker who's the jerk. We don't blame the movie-enjoyers for having weird hangups and getting worked up over nothing.

Unfortunately, we have yet to fully establish the same norms for games. In physical games—meaning games where there's no computer to automatically enforce the rules—the people who don't like games as much often feel culturally empowered to narcissistically assume their priorities are the norm and disrupt the game in pursuit of their other priorities. Those who were interested enough in the game to resist that disruption are often treated as "picky" or "obsessed" or "missing the point." That we can have the same behavioral dynamic but with opposite conclusions about Who's The Asshole is illustrative of how far we have to go in terms of culturally acknowledging the human value of games.

I hope someday this changes. I hope we can start seeing the humanity in games enough to stop demanding their justification, to stop seeing them as emulations of "better" mediums, and to stop treating interest in them as a character defect.

Maybe someday.