Why We Game

Ed Ayers: While video games are now being taken seriously as a form of artistic and cultural expression, in reality they’ve been important for a long time.

Brian Balogh: Important, Ed? Video games? Look, I understand that there are educational games out there, but really, aren’t real games supposed to be, you know, just like fun?

Ed Ayers: Well Brian, you might think that that’s the case, but it turns out that even popular video games are actually teaching players a way of thinking. Now, to understand what we learn when we plug in the PlayStation, University of Chicago Professor Patrick Jagoda says we should look at the history, of course, behind the invention of the world’s first video game.

Patrick Jagoda: Spacewar! is considered the first true video game, and that was created in 1962 by Steve Russell who was at the time a graduate student at MIT. And Russell created the game on a PDP-1 mini computer that was available to him through a lab that was supported by the US Department of Defense. And more than that, the game was called Spacewar! It was a military simulation that was drawing from the culture and the context of the military and in fact was made on machines that were funded by the military. So it’s right there at the very beginning. But of course the history of war games goes back to a much earlier moment than the 1962.

Ed Ayers: So tell me about those early war games.

Patrick Jagoda: Some of the earliest examples of systematic gamification go back to early war games in the late 18th and the early 19th century.

Ed Ayers: Wow.

Patrick Jagoda: So Prussian war games, in particular true from chess, but then added maps and military units like infantry, cavalry, artillery. And these games were used to train military commanders. And so in the 19th century in particular there were a number of board-based war games that were taken up across Europe, and eventually these games came to influence Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, and a number of contemporary games that are still played today.

Ed Ayers: Some of us have heard of economic game theory which seems puzzling to those of us who are not aficionados of that. Can you explain what it is and why it’s called game theory and what amount it had to do with video games?

Patrick Jagoda: In the 1940s we saw the rise of economic game theory based on the work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Just following World War II, that work got taken up by the RAND Corporation and basically they were using games as ways of modeling economic or political behavior, really any kind of behavior. And probably the most famous example of game theory is the prisoner’s dilemma which became a game for modeling nuclear relations between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But by the early 1950s there was a perception of limited applications of game theory to the US military. And the military was, of course, a key funding source for research in that era, and as a result of limited applications, game theory began to decline in the mid 1950s.
However, as game theory faltered, war gaming began to thrive at institutions like the Naval War College and the Johns Hopkins Operations Research office. And so some of the same researchers who had been working on game theory models began to work on actual war games and simulations that could be experienced by soldiers and other players. So there is this continuity between mathematical and economic game theory on the one hand and actual game design in the United States on the other.

Ed Ayers: If we think about the history of gaming that you’ve helped us understand, it seems that there’s kind of a connection between the military and consumer capitalism that seemed to create the context in which these games grow. Do the games bear the imprint of that world?

Patrick Jagoda: Yes, absolutely. So early military games are all about competition. It’s either two sides or more sides compete against one another. And this goes back to chess. Going back to the 19th century, we see writers thinking about chess as a way of training military commanders and politicians. War games start to do this work much more explicitly. But all of those games are fundamentally competitive, there are winners and there are losers. That kind of logic exceeds military games, of course. So much of contemporary capitalism and consumerism is based on competitive thoughts.

Ed Ayers: It seems that I hear you saying that there are sort of deep structures in games that are independent in some ways of what they seem to be on the surface. Can you tell us about that?

Patrick Jagoda: Sure. So many games are about decision making. What you’re fundamentally doing as a player is making a decision about strategy A versus strategy B. And this becomes even more literal with computer games and video games. The logic behind so many contemporary games has to do with decision trees where you’re making a dialog choice or you’re deciding where to move your avatar. And when you break down those choices, they’re usually quite binary. Do you go left or do you right? Do you make a moral choice or do you make an immoral choice? And computation in particular has an effect on games becoming more binary than they need to be. When you think another analog games, and here I would include Dungeons and Dragons and tabletop games for instance, may of those kinds of games are based on storytelling and open-ended forms of role playing. Those games are far less binary in the worlds that they make available to players and those games ask players not merely to make decisions that have been preset by designers but to imagine their own worlds and to occupy those worlds.

Ed Ayers: Many of us who don’t play video games, you point out, still have a gamified life a little bit. Can you talk about what that looks like, how the games have saturated life beyond the video game?

Patrick Jagoda: In the early 21st century we’ve seen gamification used in areas like business, dating, education, exercise, healthcare, and warfare just to name a few areas. If you think about the way that dating apps are set up, for instance, the interfaces of those apps don’t look so different from the interfaces of certain kinds of mobile games.
So critics of gamification have pointed out that gamification often uses only the most superficial aspects of the art form of games in the service of profits. And one of the biggest problems with gamification is that it focuses on extrinsic over intrinsic motivations. In other words, it gives us points, badges, and leader boards, it gives us numbers and rewards to motivate ongoing progress, but it doesn’t necessarily give us deep, meaningful reasons to want to continue playing the game.
I think there are games that strive for intrinsic motivations, games that are more artistic or are more thoughtful about their narratives, but there are also all of these examples of apps or games that are created merely to train someone to do something or to change someone’s behavior. And sometimes those apps and those games can be quite manipulative.

Ed Ayers: So it sounds as if you’d think that gamification is here to stay and that it could either be put to good purposes or less worthy ones.

Patrick Jagoda: Yes, absolutely. Games can be used in service of many things. And so many of our games today are competitive rather than cooperative, and I think there’s a real space for cooperative games and experimental genres that exceed first-person shooters or real-time strategy games to make a positive difference in our world.

Ed Ayers: Do we have reason to believe that people actually want to play cooperative games?

Patrick Jagoda: Absolutely. Think about how many cooperative games are popular. So we have board games like Pandemic, there are tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, there are video games like Porta 2 or Left 4 Dead, of course there are online games like World of Warcraft in which you work cooperatively within a guild. And I think there’s a larger point to be made here. The history of games gives us many kinds of games: competitive games, cooperative games, games of chance, role-playing and theater games, less structured forms of play and make-believe, and yet in American culture in our time competitive games have become dominant. We see this with professional sports or video games like Overwatch, but competition is a particular ideology of this historical moment, it’s a specific economic engine. But the history of games shows us that another world is possible. Cooperative games can be every bit as engaging and fulfilling as competitive games. I think we’ve only scratched the surface in terms of how far we can go down the road of those non-binary open world games.

Ed Ayers: Patrick Jagoda is an Associate Professor of English, Cinema, and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He’s the co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab.