Playing in the Moment
I follow the Penny Arcade comic strip. It’s not consistently funny, but it’s just funny enough just often enough to trigger my human reflex to keep returning just in case there’s a payoff. The creators, Tycho and Gabe, are a writer/illustrator team, and Tycho naturally turns out most of the bloggy commentary that accompanies the strip as well as filling the speech balloons. So I sit up when Gabe, the illustrator, leaves his element to labor over some text. His account of a Pokemon tournament was charming, if ungrammatical.
Adults do play Pokemon, so Gabe expected to see other adults at the tournament. He was disappointed: with the possible exception of one adolescent twerp, he was the only one with cause to shave. Gabe stayed in the tournament just long enough to humble the smack-talking teenager, then resigned to the teen and bowed out of the competition entirely.
This show of maturity was surprising enough. Gabe consistently depicts himself in the strip as a creature ruled by his id, violent and vulgar. The cockle-warming went even farther, however. Apparently, the television show, vapid as it is, has in fact instilled its fans with good sportsmanship; the kids played nice, spoke respectfully about one another’s pokemon, and shook hands after each bout. They chose which pokemon would do battle according to which ones they liked best, which were cutest or had the most appealing personalities in the cartoon. This was an eye-opener for Gabe, who had entered the competition with exhaustive research, and cards carefully selected for maximum winning potential. His determination to start using the pretty Beautifly card in place of the more effective Rotom card betrays a softer side we never see in the comic.
I attend game conventions myself now and then, aimed at an older audience. Most everyone there has learned to be a good sport, but we still play to win. Like Gabe, we do our best to maximize our chances; for popular games, and especially for complex popular games, this includes some extravagant study of the finer points of play. The pleasure lies as much in discovering winning strategies as anything. I doubt it would be possible to assemble a group of players who base their decisions purely on esthetics, but I’d like to see it happen, just to see what happens. Would we congratulate the player with the prettiest arrangement of pieces on the board, rather than the winner?
The closest I ever came to this experience was playing a game which called on players to battle with Play-doh creatures of their own design. Each figure’s statistics depend on how the figure is shaped: more legs means a greater movement allowance, size means a greater capacity to survive damage, and so on. The judge was careful to conceal these relationships from the players until after they’d built their clay warriors; only then did we learn what tactical qualities we would enjoy—or rather, had inflicted upon ourselves. Of course, once the free-for-all started, we were back to playing to win, but at least we’d started from esthetics. It was rather silly, and a lot of fun. Pity we couldn’t really recreate that experience, since the rules are easy to learn. A second round would have produced a lot of creatures with many, thick legs, pointed claws, and no fragile decorative embellishments—extra clay can be reserved for use as missiles, and any parts that fell off in play were lost, along with any abilities the judge decided they granted.
I’ve also seen, but never tried, a game called “10,000 blank cards,” grown out of some art students’ overstock of 3x5 index cards. The entire point is simply to illustrate and caption your own index cards and play them on one another; there are no rules, including winning conditions. I’ve tried explaining this game to friends on several occasions, and get only blank looks. Some of them can barely tolerate Fluxx, which includes cards to change the rules of play as you play, but does so in a regular, well-defined fashion, and sooner or later someone wins. Playing for the sake of playing is an alien concept for all of us.
I wonder if I could talk them into watching a Pokemon tournament with me.