Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Observation and Play!

Video games have always been a social pursuit in some way. Like all narrative art they promote an abstract sort of social interaction through introversion, a self-exploratory experience that simultaneously limits the player and provides them with, one day, conversational fodder. But games, unlike most narrative media, also have a secondary social component: observation.

It can be as simple as passively watching someone play Pong on a Commodore display or as involved as pointing and directing a player over his shoulder while he tries to solve the puzzles of Zelda’s dungeons, but as graphics improve and marketing makes games more and more of a socially acceptable medium people who don’t necessarily play games are sitting and watching them more and more often. Sometimes observers take on the role of a guide, helping their friends navigate particularly difficult puzzles. Sometimes they take on the role of a caretaker, making sure that gamers, health-conscious as we are as a people, don’t forget to eat or leavethe couch to defecate. And sometimes they just watch games because they enjoy it, enjoy the dynamic of observation and the action in front of them.

But what makes a game observable? Is something like Mirror’s Edge, where the action is almost incoherent to the player at times, interesting to watch? What about something like Wii Bowling, which is mind numbing when played alone. This ephemeral quality is clearly something developers consider, however round-aboutly, when designing games artistically and structurally. What, then, makes a game watch-able?

Sometimes developers make design choices, seemingly from the ground up, to make their game as palatable as possible for non-gamers. Super Mario Galaxy, for example, literally has a mode for passive observers to play along with, a feature which some of my friends have adroitly re-named “girlfriend mode” which lets a second player gather and fire star bits to help their fellow player out without the stress of directly controlling Mario. It’s a smart social aspect to a game which would otherwise be slow and tedious to watch, and a little bit disorienting. There are other elements that make it compelling to watch, things like a wondrously designed artistic style and dynamic, constantly shifting play, but girlfriend mode is what really makes Super Mario Galaxy so watchable.

Occasionally, however, art itself can be reason enough to watch a game. One of my favorite experiences with observed play was an occasion where I was asked to play through Shadow of the Colossus for a friend’s husband. He wanted to see the art and understand the story of the game but he didn’t think he’d have the patience or skill to play through it, so I was brought in, plied with beer and lunch, and asked to use my incredible gaming abilities to show him the world of Shadow of the Colossus. And, in the end, it became a very observable experience. Each time we’d sit down the house would slowly come to center around the game, watching the battle between anti-hero and guardian statue. At one point their roommate, a young man who had only a passing interest in games and no familiarity with the title whatsoever, started watching. By the end of the fight he was cheering with each stab, oohing with the writhing efforts of the Colossus to dislodge me. I had an audience, the staggering visuals and observably difficult play making the game interesting to watch, It was weird, and interesting, and owed itself almost entirely to the art direction Fumito Ueda put in to Colossus.

Then there are games that seem almost un-watchable. Most of these games are first-person experiences, unpleasant to follow over another’s shoulder. The visuals in most first-person games are fast and furious affairs, given to quick, sometimes mystifying changes which can even confuse players. Observers, who lack the incentive of actually needing to understand what the fuck is going on in order to play, don’t really have a lot to make them sit and watch. And even if observers wanted to watch first-person play most FPSes just don’t have a lot going on visually. Think of the Call of Duty games, where you wander through generic wilderness and muddled cityscapes. Or the aforementioned Mirror’s Edge, which is populated largely by monochrome environments and some of the most generic citizens imaginable. Mirror’s Edge loses points for using such a performance intensive engine to do so little, as well. Never before has so much processing power gone into rendering the manner in which a human eye functions for so little visual payoff. Even visually competent or exceptional games, like Far Cry 2 and Half-Life 2 are kind of boring to watch, experiences where awareness of what is going on off-screen is just as important as knowledge of what’s going on on-screen. It seems like hardcore games, conventional experiences we’re used to as a group, are sort of the worst candidates for observational play.

Which is what makes professional Starcraft and the broadcasting thereof such a mystifying enterprise. Perhaps the most prominent, and really the only organized example of observed play comes in the form of Starcraft tournaments broadcast to huge audiences Like, global audiences. It sounds like a miserable concept, literally watching replays of tedious games that involve lots of clicking and behind the scenes decision making, but because of some exceptional color commentary and a remarkable degree of complexity which has become totally accepted by the community and the people surrounding it watching nerds play Starcraft on television is actually pretty compelling. As absurd as it sounds I highly recommend it to anyone who finds games and the culture surrounding them even a little interesting.

It seems like the common thread in all these experiences is awareness of what’s going on, interaction with the activity of the game as an observer. If you don’t get what’s going on screen watching it won’t be that interesting for you, but if you comprehend the systems you’re watching the experience can be nearly as compelling as the game itself, especially when you’re watching actions come to a resolution. So maybe the elements that designers need to focus on when making their games are elements of transparency and representation of play rather than improving visual effects. Because making a game pretty doesn’t make it fun to watch if you have no idea what you’re looking at.