I love playing games, but I do realise this doesn’t necessarily give rise to the attitude of playfulness.
As a youngster I played a lot of chess and seemed to enjoy the idea of adding this second layer of experience onto my regular life. It felt like grafting another world onto this one; A world where the usual social order is turned on its head and different rules apply. Like taking a ‘wrong’ turn in a London street and wynding up on Diagon Ally! The pauper can find himself king at the chess club.
Some may see game playing as pure escapism; A triviality compared to this serious and most earnest ‘real life’; But i see it as another avenue of exploration. It always feels interesting to see what creativity, camaraderie and the like, we can inject into a tight and binding rule-set.
My main ‘on-off’, ‘back-burner’ game, over the past few years has been ‘Starcraft 2’.
Like chess, it’s another win/lose affair. That may be why I like it. It’s a chance for me to be a pretender to some sort of competitive spirit; An opportunity for the unassuming soul to ‘mix-it up’.
It provides a nice add-on. I already have this wider ‘real’ world, for more meaninful forays into playfulness. The marketing men might try and dictate to us who are the winners and who are the losers, but really, they only want to sell us something. They are locked into ‘winning’ at their own peculiar little game.
This ‘game of life’ really is the best sand-box, open world, exploration, puzzle game going. You just have to make sure you don’t find yourself bound to a bunch of crazy rules another player has just gone and made up. It could really put a dampener on the experience.
Playfulness is the key here. It equates to creativity, responding to the moment and a mutual respect for all involved.
‘Set plays’, are the opposite of going with the moment; They are more important in the other games though; Games where there is a well defined ‘win situation’. What appeals to me playing these is the opportunity to concoct such set-pieces, build orders, combos and traps in ‘workshop’ conditions and then later test them out in the wider world against other players. It is great to see what novelties they can come up with; Finding all manner of things that i hadn’t taken into account. Then its back to the workshop to tweak and come back with v2.0
With these games. As in life, there are many different types of players. With a game of Starcraft a lot can be gleaned from the get-go. The initial matching screen presents itself and you get to see the opponents chosen name, portrait picture and chosen ‘race’. Calculations are already taking place; How aggressive, juvenile, clever, elaborate is the name? Does the portrait picture indicate a sense of fun, a new player, a serious player, one with delusions of grandeur? Does the persons race lend itself to fast aggression or a quieter buildup?
Then the game starts and there is the question of how they respond to the ‘standard’ typed greeting, ‘glhf’ (good-luck, have fun), to set out the proceedings.
No response might indicate a certain aggressiveness or I may be facing a new player unversed in SC2 etiquette. The simple, ‘gl’ or gl;) (good luck) and I’m expecting early aggression and an ‘all-in’ play-style. Too much conversation and I might suspect they have a very ‘cheesy’ set-play and are counting on me being distracted as i type back.
Bartles taxonomy of player types is a classification of video game players based on a 1996 paper by Richard Bartle according to their preferred actions within the game.
A player’s ‘Bartle quotient’ is based on the answers to a series of 30 random questions and places them on a quadrant model based on the four character types: Explorers, Achievers, Killers and Socialisers.
The result totals 200% across all categories, with no single category exceeding 100%
Here is a link to the test:
http://matthewbarr.co.uk/bartle/
Goat 777 is: 87% explorer, 47% achiever, 40% Killer and 27% socialiser
