I was hard at work at the studio one day when Renda’s uniquely polyregional accent popped into my ears. “And if I’m at a party? And suddenly people start playing video games? I’ll leave.” She paused, as if in thought. “I’ll punch ‘em in the face!”

Unlike some people in the studio, however, I’m not opposed to video games. I certainly won’t claim any as art, but I’d hold a few up as entertainment of the highest order; wholly engaging mental exercises.

My boyhood loyalty lies with the now-obsolete text games released by Infocom in the early 1980s (though I didn’t play them until ’87 or so, when my family bought our first beige wonder, the Apple IIGS). In these games, the user navigates through a written narrative consisting entirely of dialogue and descriptions. All action occurs at a command line at the bottom of the screen, where a stripped-down syntax is used to interact with the story.

These are, far and away, the toughed games I’ve ever played – one taxing logic puzzle after another. Or illogic puzzle, really; the majority of these games were being written by programmers with a taste for the wacky non-sequitor. An example:

The ambassador wheezes loudly and hands you a brochure outlining his planet's major exports.
> look at the brochure

"The leading export of Blow'k-bibben-Gordo is the adventure game *** PLANETFALL *** written by S. Eric Meretzky. Buy one today. Better yet, buy a thousand."

The ambassador offers you a bit of celery.
> eat the celery

Oops. Looks like Blow'k-Bibben-Gordoan metabolism is not compatible with our own. You die of all sorts of convulsions.

*** You have died ***

That was taken from the popular game “Planetfall” (1983, Infocom), in which you play a man in space. I’m not sure exactly what you’re doing up there in space, because I kept dying before the plot got good. The text-only nature of these games meant that there was little chance of you accidentally solving a problem, because a successful action was the result of a very deliberate series of commands. This made it impossible to luck your way through, or to complete the thing on auto-pilot.

Incidentally, if you’d like to play Planetscape, there’s a java version here: http://www.xs4all.nl/~pot/infocom/planetfall.html. If you’ve got a spare two or three weeks you stand a chance of beating it.

…

By the time my family had a computer, the text adventure era had mostly come and gone; the advent of computers such as the Amiga (and the EGA graphics it allowed) paved the way for graphically sophisticated animated games. The keyboard was used to navigate through the crude cartoon world, although the actual interface still relied on written commands – “open door”, “push button”, “give beer to child”, etc. The image below is taken from Space Quest (Sierra On-Line, 1986), a game I never really played but from the looks of things involves robots and shopping.

The command line gameplay that these games were structured around was soon replaced by an entirely mouse-based interface commonly referred to as Point-and-Click. Although entirely visual, this new interface was still structured around the application of verbs to nouns – but instead of typing “look at car”, the user clicked the “look” icon and then clicked on the car.

Enough has been written about the semantic leap from language to icon inherent in graphic user interfaces – I’m not going to break any new ground in this essay. I will note, however, that compared to the unforgiving nature of the text adventure game, the point-and-click graphic interface was warm and encouraging, like the god of the New Testament. Your mistakes were forgiven.

The above screenshot is taken from Maniac Mansion (1987, LucasArts), a game that wore its love of b-movies right on its diskette sleeve. It featured a wide cast of playable characters, including Jeff (a blonde surfer dude), Bernard (an Ed Grimley lookalike with taped-up glasses), and the inimitable Razor, lead singer of the proto-riot grrrl group Razor and the Scummettes. (You bet they have a MySpace page! Check out the theme song, it’s killer.)

The third dimension killed point-and-click games – that’s the aphorism, anyway. The common argument being that 3d games encouraged a different mode of gameplay, a wandering-through-space that was never particularly kind on the genre. Maybe that’s true; by the time the last wave of point-and-click games came out I had given up on computer games all together.

I’d argue that what really killed the genre, however, was the growing dominance of video game consoles – the Playstation, the Nintendo, the Xbox – with their miniature joysticks and multi-button configurations. There’s something inherently clumsy about pointing and clicking when the input device allows for neither.

…

That’s not to say that there are no longer any computer games worth playing. I think I’ve just lost my patience for most of them – the majority are twitchy, hyper-kinetic reflex exercises. For me, the stimulation quickly wears off; I’m left feeling mentally depleted.

I do still like the games that require me to focus on reasoning rather than reflex – especially the ones which present a cohesive world with its own set of rules. If this world and its mechanics are elegantly constructed, the user can be left to extrapolate or intuit the full range of gameplay possibilities from the initial rule set. An awesome and diverting example is the first-person game Portal (2006, Valve).

In Portal, the user must navigate a series of increasingly complex environments using a teleportation device; create an entrance portal on one wall and an exit portal on another, and then step through the opening to step out of the exit. Through elegant game design and clever voice-over from the omniscient antagonist/narrator, the user quickly learns to rely upon the fact that forward momentum is not stalled by travel through portals. Once the mechanics of portal manipulation have been intuited, the game becomes one thrilling rebuttal to physics after another.

In order to play Portal, you’ll need a souped-up PC, or an xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game console. Perhaps you do not have these things? Then I’ve got one final recommendation: Cursor*10 (2007, Nekogames). This is a Flash game that I do not want to unpack too explicitly, because the joy of playing comes partly from learning the rules. It deals with very specific conceits of time and repetition, and is as elegant a package as any online game I’ve come across.

…

People tell me they hate video games all the time, and their arguments are usually sound: The excessive violence and the aestheticization of suffering. The shift away from community and towards isolated self-pleasure. The terrifying and weird desire to live in a simulation, turning away from a real world with real sensations, with genuine and unmoderated and undesigned experiences, already packed with tremendous beauty and strangeness.

I think all of the above are true, and your standard critique of video game culture plays out like a page from Society of the Spectacle. I’m not a cheerleader or a champion of the medium – I just find some games to be rewarding recreational experiences.

But what is the ideal game? Maybe it’s one which allows for a constant re-evaluation of rules, where the players can mutually agree to expand or contract the boundaries as they see fit, turning each iteration of the game into a critique or defense of itself.

That doesn’t sound thrilling to you? Well, it’s just a hope, an open-ended model which could be applied to any of a number of possible game scenarios. Next time you’re at my house, let’s try it out. We don’t even need to untangle cords, find the controllers, or figure out how to plug this into that. We’ll get out the Axis & Allies board, figure out a better way to play. Or we’ll just pick up a deck of cards and start from there.