Part 1: Why do we need Gaming?

Understand a person, a people, or a species through how they spend their time - apart and together

The definitions of a game are legion, and I will not add another contender to that fight. Rather, I would prefer to focus on how the activity of gaming relates to how we spend our time, trace its origins and the journey that has led to the modern day video game industry, and where I see it going beyond. This is the first in a larger four part series dealing with the larger picture of gaming.

As for my credentials for this journey, I am a twenty-something gaming enthusiast with a diverse range of interests. I started gaming at the age of five and the hobby never lost its charm, evolving with me over time, across gaming platforms, countries, and even through college. While I would not be naive enough to call any one game the best, I highly recommend Civilization V, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and This War of Mine, among a myriad of other excellent options. Now, back to the topic at hand!

Since the time of humanity's hunter-gatherer days, mankind has been faced with a timeless question: What do I do with my time? In a hunter gatherer lifestyle, between searching for the next meal and ensuring the safety of the group there probably wasn't much worry over over sonnets, epic tales, or the meaning of life, everyone was probably busy enough trying to stay alive. As we laid down settlements, domesticated wildstock, divided work, developed moral codes to clarify right and wrong behavior, and invented technologies to ease our burden of work, we found ourselves with more and more free time and less and less productive work to do in it.

From this new found time and freedom, culture and all its memes were born. Language codified our communication and art translated our thoughts and expressions and inspired even more, and along the way, games came into being. At this early stage, games may have been important for their social utility. Through friendly competition with oneself or others, games would prove to be useful means to improve the capability of the group as a whole, and thus would be encouraged, or at the very least not unnaturally discouraged. Among many possible games, war games could help children practice in safe environments and grow into able fighters or generals, crafting games may have encouraged new and better designs, word games would have encouraged mental growth and development. Most games may have simply provided a fun way to spend time and help people connect with others in the community or explore and develop their own unique identity.

Games can play a powerful part in telling stories - those building blocks of society. Simple games like Cops and Robbers help children learn on their own that in a society - responsibility is rewarded and crime is not. In this way, games are vehicles for replication of beneficial memes while also establishing what is not wanted in a society, in a simple and fun way that kids can easily internalize. Given multiple games to play, different rules and rewards to understand, I'd say its safe to add that games help people learn how to learn, an essential feature in a growing civilization. Hence, games have social utility.

As is true for all culture, games also help define the boundaries of our society, by offering us choices and reflecting the implications of our decisions back at us. By offering us new concepts and helping us understand them and develop notions of their correctness, Games help bridge the gap between mankind's reach and its grasp. For a far-out example, Mass Effect introduced us to the genophage virus (something hopefully beyond our reach at this time) that selectively decimated the population of an alien race, and showed how the survivors had devolved into risk takers with little hope for their own future, and hence excellent mercenaries with little concern for their own survival. At the same time, the game series later also gave the option of undoing the lingering damage of the virus (with its own set of complications and outcomes), a choice I'm sure almost no one will ever have to make in real life. Yet, in giving us the choice the game helped us understand what we felt was right and wrong, and should there ever come to a vote over banning development of such research, the audience may have better context regarding the implications of their decision, through the experience of an interactive choice they were offered in a game. This choice, and seeing its implications either way (stopping or not stopping the virus) helps increase our grasp as a society, by using interactivity to understand our decisions, interactivity at a level almost no other form of media can offer - not books, not movies, not music.

I hope that through this primer, you are able to appreciate some of the reasons why gaming thrives due to its utility, but it would be unfair to say that another reason why it's become a rapidly growing industry in our times is simply because it's fun. Games will continue to evolve as messengers of ideas of experience, but a real beautiful part of it all is that games will continue to improve for the sake of  games, for the sake of us enjoying our time even more. Hence, through it all games add to society richness, through adding to the meaningfulness of the time we spend, both together and apart.