![]() Masocore games are normally characterized by trial-and-error gameplay, but split up into levels or areas to create a sense of overall progress. There is a tradition of such super-difficult games, sometimes called masocore among the videogame-savvy. Many, many hours of play later, my high score is 32, a feat that has earned me the game’s gold medal (whatever that means). After an hour, I’d managed a high score of two. Scoring even a single point takes most players a considerable number of runs. Whereas football yields its beauty through the practiced triumph of the human body and will over circumstance, Sorry! delivers only the stupid, gratuitous anguish caused by our decision to play it in the first place.įlappy Bird is a perversely, oppressively difficult game. The misery of knowing what you want to accomplish but not being able to, whether thanks to the plodding pace of a child’s board game, or the bottomless strategic depth of a folk classic. It’s not the misery of boredom or stupidity, but the misery of repetition. These are games that frustrate more than they titillate, because operating them involves minimal effort yet considerable misery. and Super Bowl Sunday, there in the middle you will find the unsung paragons of gaming: games like Chess and Go and Backgammon Tic-Tac-Toe and Dots and Boxes and Crosswords Monopoly and Candy Land and Sorry!. ![]() If you look past the familiar shimmer of Super Mario Bros. Some machinery is fantastic, but most is ordinary, forgettable, broken. Sometimes that operation simulates piloting a mecha or a pro athlete or a space marine, but more frequently it entails more mundane activities: moving cards between stacks as in Klondike solitaire swapping adjacent gems as in Bejeweled directing a circular, discarnate maw as in Pac-Man. Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. Rather, we do something in-between with games. We don’t watch or read games like we do cinema and novels and paintings, nor do we perform them like we might dance or football or Frisbee. But unlike film and literature, games do not primarily depict human events and tell stories. And unlike sports, games do not primarily showcase physical prowess. ![]() Sure, a movie or a book or a painting can depict squalor, can attune us to the agony of misfortune. ![]() In this way, games are different from other media. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an idea so much as you do so in an attempt to get a broken machine to work again. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. ![]()
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