Episode Three of A Life Well Wasted asks a simple question of several interviewees in the introductory minutes of the show: why game? Ashley is referring, specifically, to video games and I’d like to alter it a bit to reflect the two answers I’d like to give: why video games?

This is actually a pretty difficult and interesting question to answer and, for now, I want to limit the scope of my response to why I enjoy video games from a consumer/player perspective. The developer/designer perspective has a lot of overlap with the player one, but is different in ways that deserve an entire article to really discuss properly. So, for now, one more change to the question: why play video games?

Like a lot of others, the reason this question is so difficult to answer is because games have been such a prominent hobby and entertainment form in my life since I was a really young child. When I was about three years old my cousins exposed me to the Super Mario Bros. on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the living room of my grandparents’ house. This was my first real exposure to games and it set off something in three-year-old Trent Polack’s head that made the center of my young life revolve around that gaming console. Soon after that, though, I played E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on the Atari 2600 a few months later and it made me never want to see a video game ever again. That’s, of course, an exaggeration, but that stupid game did make Young Trent feel woefully inadequate as a gamer. So did Pitfall. Neither of these gaming allusions matters, though. Video games were such a significant part of my life from that first time I saw Super Mario Bros. on that, like Calvin and Hobbes (and Muggsy Bogues), they are the basis for some of the key memories I define my childhood and young adult life by.

The childhood connections are the reason that separating the “why” I play video games from the familiarity and comfort of playing video games is so difficult. A lot of people I know list the immersive qualities of video games as a medium as the big reason to play games; this is, as I understand it, the “escape” reasoning for games. A number of the initial respondents in Robert Ashley’s A Life Well Wasted episode listed the benefits of games as a means of escaping “from reality for a while” (a quote from the episode). I know this isn’t why I play games, but I can understand the reasoning why people would consider this such a profound reasoning for their interest in the medium. Games more so than any other form of entertainment have the ability to completely place a player in the world of a game. Books, movies, music, and television all have similar capabilities, but none of these media (with the possible exception of books) demand such complete and undivided attention of their consumer. Games demand players to be active, thinking, and performing in order to successfully engage in a given game and, for the most part, this is why parents and the media can successfully attack the violence in games more than comparable acts in other media.

I play games because they allow for a type of entertainment that is completely unique to video gaming as a medium and the range of experiences that games allow for. An individual game is more involved than a toy, more autonomous than a board or card game, allows for more interactivity and participation than a movie or television show, utilizes a diverse sound track for varying moods, and is easier to setup and get involved with than arranging a game of basketball or football. As I type up this entry I have the ability to click on my dock and load up a game of Plants vs. Zombies which will allow me to play an amusing, thought-provoking, reflex-testing puzzle game; the time from thinking about playing this kind of game to actually playing this game is about thirty seconds at most. If I wanted to test my reflexes and teamwork strategies in a social environment I could grab a couple friends (or complete strangers) for a game of Left 4 Dead. If I wanted to see the comic book heroes of my youth come to life with the sole purpose of being eviscerated by Wolverine’s adamantium claws, I could go load up my saved game of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Or maybe I just want to fine-tune the performance of my 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt SS Coupe in the new Career Mode in Forza Motorsport 2 that I started a couple weeks ago.

Every single one of the aforementioned games provides a completely different experience than the other and playing any one of them is not a passive experience where I can just sit on a couch and turn my brain off — no, that’s not what video games are for. Most video games are for engaging players in ways that other media simply cannot do and demand the attention and near-constant feedback of players. Games set up their worlds, a generally discrete rule set, and then the players are asked to play the game based on those criteria in a way that is, for most genres (games like Dragon’s Lair are a different scenario), completely unique. This is fun for me; I like engaging in an entertainment which allows me to actively alter the experience I’m having (it’s one of the reasons that meaning through gameplay mechanics and emergence are so close to my heart). I have an easier and more enjoyable time sitting down knowing that I have agency in the activity that I’m doing than I do when I sit down to just watch a movie or television show. I do, of course, still watch movies and television shows, but the kinship I feel with video games and gaming as a medium is the reason I’ve stayed so close to it since I was a kid.

Basically, I like fun.