Game Time by Christopher Hanson

Author:Christopher Hanson [Hanson, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-04-20T00:00:00+00:00

chapter five

AN INSTINCT TOWARD REPETITION: REPLAY VALUE, MASTERY, AND RE-CREATION

FOR SOME REASON, I FOUND MYSELF UNABLE TO STOP PLAYING DON’T STARVE (Klei Entertainment, 2013) for several sleep-deprived weeks. To be clear: I really enjoy the game and I am one of its many fans. But I am not a very good player, and I kept playing despite the fact that I had been entirely unsuccessful in doing the one very simple thing that is asked of me: exactly what the game title suggests. I was starving repeatedly. Don’t Starve is a roguelike game that features permadeath and restricts saving in the ways that games of this genre often do, as discussed in the previous chapter.1 As a result, irresponsibly letting my character starve or fall victim to the remarkably varied ways in which I learned my avatar could be killed meant losing all the things that I had gathered and constructed (e.g., fire pits, stockpiles of wood, and tools that I had built) and starting over from scratch on the endless quest for twigs and berries (see fig. 5.1). I wondered why I was repeatedly subjecting myself to this exercise in futility and, until now, relatively private form of shame. While I have learned that there are ways to successfully complete a play session of Don’t Starve, I personally have never experienced any of these win conditions and I strongly suspect that I never will.

This realization that I compulsively kept playing Don’t Starve brought to mind other games that I have played and enjoyed, despite the tacit understanding that I will never actually “win” when I play them. Take Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1984), for example. The one thing I know when I sit down to play Tetris is that I will lose. It is not a matter of if I will lose, but simply when I will lose.2 I might beat a previous high score that I had achieved or manage to keep a particular play session going for longer than any previous time that I had played, but I could always count on losing. But while I am guaranteed to lose, I am compelled to play and replay, slowly (or in my case, not ever) becoming more adept at maneuvering the pieces.

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