Welcome to the WIRED Book Club, a series where we invite you to read along with us as we delve into recent titles that give an insight into the worlds of technology, science and business.
Here’s the deal: each month we select a different non-fiction book that piques our interest, and that we think our readers will enjoy too. We’ll give you roughly a month to read the book, then we’ll discuss our thoughts on the WIRED Podcast. At the same time, we’ll announce the next book.
This month’s book is Pete Etchells’ Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do for Us. The book explores the different reasons that compel us to play video games and covers the latest research on how games affect human behaviour. In doing so, it dispels some of the myths around gaming and presents Etchells' own personal journey as a video game player and, later, researcher.
We’ll discuss Lost in a Good Game, and announce our next book club title, on the podcast on June 7. We’d also love to hear your thoughts on the book – send your reviews, comments and questions to podcast@wired.co.uk for inclusion in our discussion.
To get you started, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of Lost in a Good Game.
Pick up a copy of Lost in a Good Game: In pardback, on Audible, on Kindle or hunt it down at your local library. Once you’ve read it, let us know what you think. Email podcast@wired.co.uk with your reviews, comments and questions – we’ll read out a selection on the WIRED Podcast on June 7.
Lost in a Good Game, by Pete Etchells
There’s a landscape, not all that far away from here, that over the years I have come to know in intimate detail. It’s a frigid, desolate place where snow-crusted mountaintops give way to ravines scattered with pockets of hardened civilisation. To the east of where I’m camping, the sharp, rocky heads of a mountain range climb towards a purple and stormy sky. Far below, I can just about make out a frozen stretch of water, lined by trees that look, from this distance, like cake decorations dusted with icing sugar. I stare off into the fog. I’m in a dangerous place, but it’s one that I have come to associate with a certain serenity. It’s peaceful here. Quiet.
I’m waiting for dragons.
Back in my room, I pulled my legs up onto the chair, and reached for a mug of coffee as a lightning storm played out in the distance on the screen in front of me. The mug had been empty for several hours now, and I was left with only a drying brown halo of silt at the bottom. It was late, and I was tired, but I couldn’t sleep. I was in the first year of my PhD, but it wasn’t work that was bothering me. Today was an anniversary. I blinked as I carefully studied the screen.
No dragons yet.
It wasn’t just any dragon I was looking for. This particular one lived up to its epithet. ‘The Time-Lost Proto Drake’. What a name! In my mind, it evoked an image of an ancient monstrosity with vast wings of torn and mouldering yellow leather. But the name carried a double meaning – it was also one of hardest things to find in World of Warcraft. You might spend weeks, months – even years, God forbid – tracing a path around the mountains in search of it, and only come across tantalising flecks of evidence reminding you that it’s there, but just out of reach; perhaps the old corpse of an instance of the beast that someone else got to first. Or you might be one of the infuriating ones, the lucky bastards who claim that they just ‘happened across it’ without even trying. A random-number generator masquerading as good fortune, or karma for that rare weapon you didn’t receive after killing that dungeon boss last week. It was somewhere in this snowy landscape, an area called the Storm Peaks, and I was hoping I would be one of the lucky ones. It didn’t look like it was going to turn out that way though – this time around I’d been sitting there for over an hour, and so far, nothing.
In a way, I didn’t really care whether I actually saw the damn thing or not. This was all about distraction. I was imagining what it would be really like, sheltering on that ledge at the top of this rich fantasy world, watching other players fly by on gryphons, wyverns, and levitating mechanical heads. Trying to imagine what the dramatic storms overhead would actually sound like, feel like. Smell like. Some people get lost in a good book. I get lost in a good game. A message popped up in the chat window in the bottom corner of the screen. It was Dave, the leader of the small guild of which I was a member.
"Seen it yet?"
"Not a chance," I replied. "Not really looking though." His response flashed up after a moment. "Wanna do a dungeon instead?" An invite to join a group popped up on my screen, and a few minutes later, we were off on an adventure someplace else to take down a monster and grab some loot. The Time-Lost Proto Drake would have to wait for another day.
World of Warcraft is one of the most – if not the most – successful ‘massively multiplayer online’ games, or MMOs, of all time. To the untrained eye, it’s an archetypal ‘violent video game’ – you create a character, grab a weapon, and jaunt off on various quests to smash things, ranging from fairly innocent low-level boars to terrifying Lovecraftian monstrosities. But the thing that gets lost in the overly-simplistic narratives you might see in the news about World of Warcraft being a violent game is that there’s more than one way to play it. Some people like to create an array of different characters, just for the experience: elf druids, human warriors, dwarven hunters, zombie warlocks. Or, you can play it as a purely competitive team game – two factions, the Alliance and the Horde, square off in anything from strategic ‘capture the flag’ style matches to all-out brawls. Or you can play it in true role-playing style, develop a character with a rich and lengthy history, and spend your time acting out a story on the grandest of scales. Sometimes, you find players who approach the game in a completely pacifist way, levelling their characters up solely by harvesting flowers and mining for ore. Other people devote the majority of their time to collecting riding mounts – animals like the Time-Lost Proto Drake that you can use to travel around the world. There are hundreds of them. I once spent three weeks – three weeks – wandering around a tiny mine in a distant corner of the game collecting randomly-spawning eggs, just so that I could claim a Netherwing Drake mount. It became an obsession, and was completely worth the effort. The first time I took to the skies on it, it was beautiful – wings of iridescent purple that spanned the entire width of the screen made it difficult to see where I was flying, but I thought that it was a wonder to behold. It still takes pride of place in the ranking of my zoo’s worth of rides. In short, to simply call World of Warcraft a violent game is to miss the innumerable experiences that it has to offer.
This sense of freedom probably explains some of World of Warcraft’s runaway success. Video games like this provide us with the opportunity to experience the world (as well as other worlds) in a way that no other form of media really comes close to, in part because they are an inherently personal experience. In a 2013 radio essay coinciding with the centenary of Albert Camus’ birth, Naomi Alderman, the novelist and games designer, elaborates on why: "While all art forms can elicit powerful emotions," she says, "only games can make their audience feel the emotion of agency. A novel can make you feel sad, but only a game can make you feel guilty for your actions. A play can make you feel joyful, but only a game can make you feel proud of yourself. A movie can make you feel angry with a traitor, but only a game can make you feel personally betrayed.’
Alderman is talking about how games embody the principles of existentialism. Just as philosophers like Camus or Sartre suggested that, in a universe from which God has departed, we define our own meaning in life (that we are nothing but that which we make of ourselves) so too do games force us to define ourselves via a series of choices, to make decisions in order to achieve something; anything. MMOs like World of Warcraft encapsulate this idea beautifully. There is an overarching storyline, but you’re not required to participate in it if you don’t want to. It’s not a linear game. You’re free to do as much or as little as you choose – and from the point of view of the individual player, the possibilities are endless.
There are all sorts of reasons why people play video games, and there are all sorts of people who play them. Over the course of this book, I’ll explore these reasons and the scientific research that’s gone into understanding them. I should say at this point, though, that the scientific research comes with some heavy caveats. Video games research is only a budding area of science, sitting largely within psychology, which is itself still a relatively young discipline when compared to some of the ‘harder’ sciences like physics or chemistry. It’s made all the more complicated by two facts: firstly, technology develops at a faster rate than research can be conducted, which means that the methods used to study video games are often contentious. The second is that people are messy. Running psychological studies that involve human participants doing anything (let alone playing video games) is hard. They do things that you never anticipated: things that can break your experiments. They try to give you the answer they think you want. Some of the more annoying ones try to give you the answer they think you don’t want. And all of this put together means that there are as yet no universal or conclusive truths about what researchers do or do not know about the effects that video games have on us, or why people play them. Sorry to disappoint you so early on, but I promise that digging deeper into this state of affairs will give you a pretty good understanding of where we’re at in terms of the current state of psychological science. And hopefully, along the way, I’ll be able to dispel a few myths about the effects of games – and technology in general – that might make you worry less over some of the more hysterical headlines in the news about society as we know it being destroyed by your smartphone, or by Instagram-saturated millennials, or by whichever video game people are taking exception to this particular week.
Anyway, as I say, there is a plethora of reasons why people get into gaming. Some play purely to interact with other people. Some simply enjoy the level of escapism offered by complex and multifaceted digital worlds. Fundamentally, whatever our reasons for playing them, video games afford us a chance to learn something different, to explore somewhere new, and, potentially, find out something about ourselves. Reinforcing this point, Naomi Alderman suggests that "the game is the only form that actually places the audience on that existentialist stage, where we’re all forced to find out who we really are." In that sense, video game play is one of the most fundamentally important activities we can take part in.
For me though, there was a simpler reason that I was playing Warcraft that night, looking for that elusive dragon. I was playing to distract myself from the anniversary of my dad’s death.
Pick up a copy of Lost in a Good Game: In hardback, on Audible, on Kindle or hunt it down at your local library. Once you’ve read it, let us know what you think. Email podcast@wired.co.uk with your reviews, comments and questions – we’ll read out a selection on the WIRED Podcast on June 7.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
