What could be more fun than organizing items into containers?
In this, the site’s main series, I dive into gaming’s “deep questions.” What are games? How do they work? Are they “art?” Should Dark Souls have an easy mode? The answers may surprise you!
One of my goals with Philosophy of Fun is to have interesting conversations with thoughtful people. To that end, I do a follow-up post to every article in which I highlight and respond to some of my favorite comments.
For each entry in this series I analyze a different game mechanic or system, trying to figure out how it works, imagining how it could be different, and seeing what we might be able to learn from it, be that something about games or ourselves.
Here I play older games – often critically-acclaimed “classics” – both to gain a better understanding of gaming history and make a futile attempt at decreasing the size of my ever-growing backlog. I try to meet these relics of the past both in their historical contexts and with a modern perspective, and see what we can learn from games that have (or perhaps haven’t) stood the test of time.
Sometimes it’s fun to get a bit opinionated. These posts are more like “traditional” game reviews than my others writing: persuasive essays that discuss how I feel about a game and why. Exploring your personal preferences like this can be very enlightening – it helps you to “know thyself,” as the ancient Greek aphorism implores, and it helps others better understand your particular predilections.
These days, we have an incredible amount of games to choose from – so many that it can be hard to decide what to play. Something I like to do is quickly try out a bunch of games in succession, and in this series I discuss what captured my interest, what didn’t, and why.
To be honest, the most fun I have with Philosophy isn’t in coming up with my own ideas, but in analyzing those of others. There’s a nigh-infinitude of arguments, opinions, and theories about games being discussed all over the Internet, and I love finding the most interesting or controversial ones and digging into them. While the “Philosophy of Fun” series might address the ideas that come up in these discussions, “Dissecting the Discourse” focuses on people’s thought processes and argumentation. We’ll see what people think, whether it makes sense, and perhaps where logical fallacies and hidden assumptions lead conversations astray.