Why we Game

Recently, the video-game industry has become enormous, raking in more money than the film, book, and TV industries.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the video game industry’s success is its versatility in genre. For example, people can experience the same the historical event like the colonization of America from a “god’s eye” over the top strategic view, from a lone gunman’s point of view, or maybe just as an animated scene which is being used to further a story.

While the other industries have genres, video games have different ways to actually be interacted with. Some games require exploration, some require hard skill, and some just require a time commitment.



The time commitment aspect is probably one of the most interesting to consider.
One of the “modes of interaction” in video games is the “role-playing” game or RPG. In RPG’s oftentimes the character becomes stronger as he faces more and more enemies, so if your character gets stuck on a hard boss, all you really have to do is take the character back to where things were easier and beat up weaklings until your character is strong enough to defeat the harder foe ahead. Gamers refer to this notion as “grinding” because most people will tell you that it is a tedious process.

But is it so tedious?


What people get from games like RPG’s are a sense of satisfaction that any single person could achieve just by playing the game for a while. People continue to play RPG’s because that sense of accomplishment is easily attainable and you really can’t fail so long as you commit to the process.

The problem of course is that with that kind of a commitment, the aesthetics of the game become irrelevant, and simply slide into the background, because they don’t matter anymore, instead, games simply become a job that end up not yielding any fruit.

People will play these games and gain a false sense of accomplishment as opposed to accepting games for the work of art that they can be, and then moving on with their lives.

It’s a frightening notion and I think Theodor Adorno would have spoken out against such a medium were people get so distracted by the diversions in life that they actually begin to care about their standings in the world which they are escaping to.