It’s interesting what a developer will do to market their games.

Now, the last Naughty Dog game I remember even playing was Jak 2 (Uncharted doesn’t appeal to me, honestly), but really? Change the industry?

The way they describe it sounds eerily similar to Heavy Rain, the best quick-time event in any game ever. Wait, that was a game?

Here’s the thing: making  a good story does not make a great game, and vice versa. That will never be the case at any time, ever. If we have both, great! If we have just a story, well…pick a different medium, because if you’re talking about “actors” and “performances”, you’re missing the point.

To put it straight: WHERE IS THE PLAYER IN ALL OF THIS?

Naughty Dog wants me to have “an experience”, but one purely in the spectatorial mode. Obviously, the characters in the story are predefined and set in stone, so this is going to be something linear and straight-foward. This is not moving the medium forward in any way. It is doing what has already been done. It is creating a movie in a video game, so unless Naughty Dog’s narrative is being written by a professional screenwriter, I can’t see where this will end but bad things.

I may be too scared to play Silent Hill 2, but I know enough to tell you that SH2 is where games which want to tell stories should head immediately. It makes the player’s decisions matter, and integrates them into the story. Even if it’s obviously linear, the game is constructed in a way that makes it feel like you are in control of James Sunderland, wherever his fate may lead. Interactivity is taken full advantage.

The Last of Us, on the other hand, feels like how movie theaters threw 3D onto everything in a grand blitz for money, saying “this is different, really!”, when it wasn’t much but empty promises and things flying at your eyes. Let’s stop trying to live up to expectations from people who don’t even PLAY or UNDERSTAND video games;  let them evolve on their own.

A linear zombie game is not going to “change the f**cking industry”, that’s for sure. Of course, let’s wait and see.

Yeah, complicated sounding title, but it’s pretty descriptive of what’s actually in there.

For those not in the know, “Game Studies” has become a genuine field of study, specifically of the video game kind. They have cut the field into the rule-focused (ludology) and the narrative focused (obviously, narratology) Still, I don’t think either approach in these fields helps the “game as art” debate because they isolate elements without integrating all the unique qualities of video games. This paper is an attempt to bridge that gap using John Dewey’s late aesthetic theory as seen in his work Art as Experience.

Dewey, obviously, was not alive before the advent of the video game, so I have had to construct my own theory with his ideas as a groundwork, but I think it expresses everything people think about “art” in terms of video games, but haven’t been able to express in words.

Anyway, enjoy the article! And Happy New Year (belated)

So there you go. No need to actually post it here; reformatting it would be a terrible waste of time (I may do it someday, just not now)! Just download and enjoy (it’s about 20 pages long or so).

I told you I’d have something cooked up!

However, given that I have four research papers to write, all of them will be video game related (and maybe put into a proper book or collection of essays someday), so be sure to be on the lookout for them…I will post them here in their entirety first in rough draft (not publishable) form, just for fun.

Charles Peirce, one of the first of the American Pragmatists, has a particular conception of how logical reasoning works. We don’t have self-consciousness in the sense of the Cartesian ideal; instead, our cognitions (anything that occurs in the brain, really) are caused by outside stimuli, the constant flow of information arising from the real world. Any thoughts from us arise out of our beliefs, or habits as he calls them. We are inclined to live in a particular way from habits formed over time. Think about the way you walk; those habits of walking with one foot in front of the other, basically were instilled over a long period of time. You don’t think about it because that habit was established long ago. However, think about what happens when you trip while walking – suddenly, you’re out of order, you have to think about walking (which you haven’t been doing consciously), and thus solve the problem somehow. Thought, for Peirce, is much like that. It arises when our habits no longer correspond to the situation or the real world – we must think, and think, and think, until that belief has been resolved, altered, or removed, and then the human being inserts a new habit to replace the old one…until something new comes along.

In fact, this process continues near infinitely in the entire community of civilization – we continually reform our opinions and beliefs as we find they do not correspond to reality, and in theory human society will reach a point where all knowledge in human beings correspond to reality. Again, this part is speculative, but the idea is clear enough. While I don’t agree that the real world is just simply “the real world”, I’m not inclined to disagree, either. Perhaps I’ve just grown up in the state of doubt.

What struck me, though, is just how relevant this is to the process of learning a video game. It is the very essence of this concept, whatever kind of game you’re playing. Take an action game, for example – it will present certain rules to you, and the game reality is structured in a way that these rules will always (barrings bugs and errors in the game code) hold for the player. In a first person shooter, aiming, shooting, taking cover, etc., are all rules the game expects you to follow – if you don’t, you will fail. If you keep failing, it is because you have not learned the game’s rules.

However, the very basics of control don’t lead us to mastery. The game will, in fact, present additional obstacles that test your knowledge and capacity of the game system. Bayonetta, for example, just begs you to explore its combat system in its Alfheim events – one challenge involves going 100 yds in the air, or something to that effect. This is something that doesn’t make sense, at first glance – why would I want to do that, after all, if the game is about combat – but a specific weapon, the Kulshedra, bounces you into the air if you whip and hold the enemies. The challenge is easy, but only if you are creative within the rules and systems the game presents.

I can go even further, here, by showing a role-playing game. Dragon Quest, for example, trains you to talk to every townsperson – they might provide hints or clues, but at least one person in the town tells you where to go, whether or not you realize it. The game, literally, trains you to do this in every town, repeatedly – this is how the world works, you realize, and either I get stuck in the first town area or I try to figure out what sequence of events the games wants me to go in. Furthermore, battles train you to actually check the numbers of the enemies. At a point, you’re trying for efficiency in every random battle, as well as resource management, a constant tension (especially in dungeons). Shall I use a spell that hits all enemies, or use physical attacks for single targets? Which enemy is the most dangerous? Which enemies are simply pushovers? If multiples enemies have dangerous attacks, which one should I take out first? You’re not actively thinking about this most of the time, so much as your habits in the game are being challenged, repeatedly, by the game itself. Eventually, you master the game and finish it.

This doesn’t occur in fighting games, however, as each new opponent brings a different set of challenges. The rule set can be mastered, but you now have to discern the habits of an entirely different person that clashes with your own. This takes time and dedication to master these games, and even then, you can have a bad day and perform horribly.

But, again, videogames are all about habits, training habits in the game’s world. In that way, it’s a microcosm of our own personal worlds, and that’s why we like playing games. We enter new worlds, learn about them, and then try to master them. We encounter new experiences, mold our habits accordingly, then resolve our tension through learning the rules. As there are so many videogames, there are a limitless amount of new habits, and many habits transfer straight over to new games. These same skills carry over to life, only we don’t examine it in that way. So, are a lot of people who play videogames really just goal-oriented and looking for fun? Or are they unknowingly training themselves in habits befitting a scientific, post-Enlightenment world?

Fascinating stuff, huh?

No game has disappointed me more than Xenogears.

I may have been playing it 13 years or so after its original release, but I think having the “Squaresoft” logo on its cover during the Playstation era seals the deal for most people. However, to be absolutely critical is simply the more honest approach; I cannot let the rose-colored glasses taint my view of the game, and so I must see it in the best possible light.

Xenogears, itself, is an odd beast; its story, theme, and setting were created by none other than Tetsuya Takahashi, who at the time was working for Squaresoft. He was, furthermore, originally drafting a story fit for the next Final Fantasy game (what would eventually become Final Fantasy VII). However, the Squaresoft executives, finding the scenario writer’s imagination too dark and inaccessible for the Final Fantasy moniker, instead decided to give Takahashi full control over his own original game. Perhaps it was a mistake to give the man so much power, perhaps not.

With that stroke of luck, Takahashi created the game we now know as Xenogears, a crazy mishmash of game ideas and pseudo-philosophy cooked into a giant melting pot of genre stereotypes, high school philosophical musings, and boring combat.

NOTE: I make no attempt at avoiding spoilers, so read at your own risk.

No discussion of the game could be made without touching that both totally gorgeous, and absolutely awful, plot. We begin with protagonist Fei Fong Wong, who has amnesia (trope number 1 identified) and can’t remember his past. He was found, three years ago, at Lahan, a small village located in the country of Aveh, which is at war with Kislev (dropped off by his father’s friend, Wiseman!). So, he ends up destroying the village due to a mysterious power, and off we go on an adventure to find out why BAD THINGS HAPPEN.

I mean, honestly, the premise sounds totally generic, right? And it is, for a while. You meet a bunch of characters like Citan, wise old doctor, and Bart, thief with a heart of gold who also doubles as a king when the story requires. Hey, look, Elly, a reluctant female protagonist who must choose between her country and what her heart tells her! And some kind of evil villain, Grahf, who says mysterious things about power and stuff! I mean, if we could get any more generic, we’d be inside an American Eagle store in a mall somewhere.

But then, as we go along, the plot keeps adding on complications. Citan actually works for the Emperor of Solaris; Grahf is actually the continual personality of Lacan possessing the bodies of other people; humans only have 10,000 years of history because that’s when they dropped onto this planet; God wants to kill everybody, a complete inversion of the Judeo-Christian story. Angels are everywhere; people inherit memories through DNA, there’s an Adam and Eve thing somewhere, prototype people, mysterious entities from different dimensions that can destroy dimensions, multiple personality disorder therapy in real time, and OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP. Suddenly, you’ve lost all your JRPG bearings and you just want to cry in a room somewhere, honestly.

Man, those first 50 hours were captivating. Takahashi REALLY knows how to get a story going. Let’s say the character development of Disc 1, as I will call it, works incredibly well because we spend a great deal of time with a few of them, especially Fei, Citan, and Elly. They are, quite honestly, the only party members that have a real bearing on the main narrative, and even then Citan drops out somewhere along the way. The game starts out slow; for about 20 hours, you are basically seeing character interaction at various places, learning about the universe itself rather than the people you control. But that’s a good thing; you want to know these characters so that we care for the conflict that follows. All great JRPGs do this, even the early ones (FFIV’s Cecil, Rosa, Kain, etc). However, like the works of J. J. Abrams, a great premise does not guarantee a great story (see: Lost, and its utterly inexplicable ending which explains nothing).

And that, for all its novelty, is a big problem with Xenogears: the world, and its metaphysics, ultimately trump the personalities who actually experience these things. Once we reach Disc 2, certainly, we find that Fei and Elly retain the memories of their ancestors, thus making their identities a moot point to the grand metaphysical conflict taking place. Grahf, Miang, Krelian, and Kahr Ramsus are merely copies or clones of other people who originally exist, or simply devices. Is the universe fascinating? Of course, absolutely. However, the format of a JRPG does not fit the material at all. Try making Lord of the Rings into a JRPG, and you’ll see what I mean (the fact that the game is “Episode V” scares me, and even the release of that Japan only book describing the other episodes makes that clear). So for all that, I no longer care about the protagonists at all, but I do want to see what happens to the universe. There’s no emotional connection, and for an Role-Playing Game with a Story, that’s simply unacceptable; how can I care what’s going on if I don’t care about WHO I AM PLAYING?

Furthermore, Takahashi simply doesn’t know what he wants with the material. He takes the MOST surface-level ideas of two psychologists and one philosopher, and somehow constructs a message entirely antithetical to the philosopher, and perhaps disingenuous to the psychologists. Those, of course, are Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung. In order, he take the “God is dead”, Id-Ego-SuperEgo, and collective unconscious into an amorphous mold, creating no message at all in the process. What does it all mean, really? You can’t just take Nietzsche out of context; you need to understand why he said these things. He believed himself as one of the new “free spirits” of humanity, an “Ubermensch” who has risen above the petty quarrels of humanity and conquers. Maybe Takahashi read a bit too much Zarathustra (it’s a metaphor, not a literal reading), but that’s not Nietzsche’s point at all; it’s a dumbing down. As for Freud and Jung, Takahashi toys with these ideas and makes them slightly incoherent. If you have to explain this much in storytelling, you are doing something wrong. If the ideas are naturally linked to the narrative, they are SHOWN rather than TOLD.

It’s undergraduate philosophy at its best, pretentious, self-important, and egoistic. It says “Yeah, I know the solution to everything”, and yet tells me nothing. I am 24 years old; I know the world is more complicated than that of a video game. If you have ever watched Little Miss Sunshine, remember the kid with the Nietzsche posters in his room? Yeah, that’s Takahashi’s sense of the world.

To state it most clearly in the terms of Xenogears, the message the game wants me to see is “we are human beings, and we should get along, even though we have flaws, and we don’t need God to do that.” But really, this message is in no way tied to the distinct characteristics and evolving plot of the universe at all. Instead, the game increasingly becomes preachy and pretentious in tone, reaching a high point with the last few hours of the game. As a narrative, it fails to reach a message because of its detachment from the characters who experience it. Unlike, let’s say, Final Fantasy VII, whose message of “cherish life” was integrated ABSOLUTELY in the narrative of Cloud and Mako/Lifestream energy, it just doesn’t work here. Takahashi has too many ideas, and not enough focus to channel them.

This lack of focus exposes many other flaws as well. Takahashi made a great first half…and then suddenly the dreaded Disc becomes less a game and more an interactive novel where you get to press the save button every once and a while. Obviously, their resources were squandered on the first “half” of a story that needed much more time. I am faulting the developers on this one; it could have been completed in time, but they chose otherwise. I finished the game in 60 hours, 50 for the first disc and 10 for the latter.

Basically, whatever resources they had left was cobbled into a rushed 10 hours experience. It should have been left for a sequel, but it just doesn’t work. Anima Dungeon 1 and 2 just make me laugh with their titles – seriously, it’s incomplete. Check out the World Map on Disc 2, and everything from Disc 1 is STILL THERE, even though they said the world was destroyed; you just can’t enter them. Honestly, it’s just lazy. They had the resources, and they messed up, simple as that. Whatever was complete was shipped out the door.

Even so, I’ve not talked about the “game” portion at all. To put it bluntly, the battle system is terrible. Again, Final Fantasy VII does this right; an actual portion of the plot, Materia, is heavily used in EVERY SINGLE battle in the game; it’s even a plot point, for God’s sake. Xenogears, on the other hand, has gears…that are, really, irrelevant to the plot. The thing in the TITLE really is a side issue at best, and get shoehorned into the game at the last minute (ZOHAR). And the battle system fares no better, because it exists as a vehicle to get to the next cutscene. It’s terrifying how boring it all is. You get attacks, and attack combos, which look neat and all, but they all happen to have the exact same function – whichever one requires the most button presses is the best, or costs the most fuel. Plus, enemy variety is extremely lacking; usually, there’s only 3 in every area, and they don’t require much thinking to defeat except what was outlined previously. Xenogears’ battles give you options, to be sure, but no place to use them.

Given this negative criticism, the graphics have aged rather well. The 2/3D mix actually lends itself well to the art style; it certainly looks fine now, though obviously aged. It has fared better than FFVII in that respect, to be sure. I also give kudos to Yasunori Mitsuda’s amazing multipurpose soundtrack; it really makes moments of the game more emotional than, given the story, they have any right to be. Chrono Trigger was simply a generic RPG OST, if a particularly memorable one due to the game it was associated with, but Xenogears shows his Celtic stylings, chanting, and techno influences come into full blossom. It’s even shorter than the CT OST, yet each song, used multiple times, is exactly fitting for each situation.

However, as a game, Xenogears fails; as a plot, it fails. I’m sorry to say, but Xenogears is a failure. The fact that a game captivates you for a while does not diminish the sour taste of its aftermath. All its attempts at posturing and being “more than a game” make it incredibly depressing to play. At times, I just wanted to throttle the creators, and tell them how to make it awesome. Seriously, the ideas behind this are great, but it all amounts to focus. If you want a good game, you need a focused vision (see: Hideki Kamiya, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Shinji Mikami, Daiskue Ishiwatari). Xenogears is a victim of its own creator’s misplaced ambitions, an unfortunate casualty of the “games are art” movement even before it began. And, let me say, any attempts to compare this to literature like Dostoevsky and Tolkein’s works (http://xenoverse.xenotensei.com/) just BEGS for common sense. It’s not really a game, so much as it is a failed attempt at literature.

Just let me play the game, dude, not your pretentious message.

I know you’ll miss me, and my developing thoughts about Xenogears (right before final boss) and a review! Joy!

Update: I am alive, I am just lazy and am playing Grandia, Arcana Heart 3, and FINALLY finished Xenogears, so now I can write that review…

When I feel like it (but probably within the week).

I was born and raised an Evangelical Baptist; notably, there are certain connotations that arise from such a connection. Probably the most prominent is the constant focus, especially for young persons, to get married as quickly as possible. My parents, who were married in their late 20s, were not at all concerned by this particular part of the “Christian culture”, and basically let me do what I please. The impetus for getting married early stems from several sources: parental concerns (or forcing marriage), trying to kick one’s children out of the house, and probably the worst culprit, a fear of sin.

I’m not saying, of course, that fear of sin is a bad thing; all Christians, at some point or another, need to recognize sin in their own lives, confront it, pray about it, and take steps to correct it. What I am worried about is when the fear of sin takes over one’s life, until all other concerns hold second billing. That includes Christ, of course; I’ve seen this phenomenon in just about every Christian environment I’ve ever entered. Some call it “legalism”, and it is still around, believe it or not. Even Catholic doctrine has mostly eliminated this particular strain, but it remains in Evangelical circles all the more.

Thus, “pleasure” enters into the discussion. The problem, in my view, is that pleasure gains a negative connotation – I.e., a connection to “sin”. So, things such as watching movies, listening to music, playing video games, drinking alcohol and venturing at all into popular cultures becomes falsely conflated with “sin”, and ultimately banned from “true Christians”.

Pleasure, as I define it, is the enjoyment of any particular activity, physical or mental. This can go from intellectual delights such as philosophical and theological discussion (hey, the point of this here blog!) or as base as a good glass of Riesling and sex. Pleasure, like anything else, is good in moderation, bad in both excess and forced decession (I learned a new word). Moderation itself isn’t really found in the Bible, but a related word is: temperance. I’ll give a few (that I stole from another website) to say as such. Again, translations vary, but I think it looks obvious enough:

Let your moderation be known unto all men. The Lord is at hand. – Philippians 4:5 NKJV

And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. – 1 Corinthians 9:25a NKJV

Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls. – Proverbs 25:28 NKJV

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; - Ephesians 5:18 KJV

For the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty. – Proverbs 23:21a NKJV

Paul repeatedly states that Christ has freed us from the Law, yet we try to “reintegrate” it into ours lives. Have we not learned that the “wages of sin is death”? Why, exactly, would we regress willingly to a state before Christ saved humanity? It is, in fact, the fear of freedom. We need to control ourselves, and we certainly have the power in Christ to do so, but our need FOR control drives us to create arbitrary rules for ourselves (I’m talking about Christians, here) that aren’t necessarily Scriptural. It doesn’t apparently matter that Jesus turns water into wine and gets everyone drunk there (and we have no idea how good a drinker Jesus was, either), and certainly nothing is said of it in Scripture. People even justify their abstinence from drinking by convincing themselves that “wine” in the Bible is some kind of different, low alcohol content fermented substance. Christians don’t need to dilute themselves, but control themselves.

As such, “pleasure” is never the antithesis of Christianity, but a central component. This is not quite John Piper’s Christian Hedonism (God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. ), but it’s a start. When Christians reject pleasure, which God obviously created us with the capacity to have, whatever it might be, we reject a part of the creation. Like everything else, pleasure has been corrupted by sin, but that can’t mean we avoid it altogether. It’s simply a part of human existence, whether one likes it or not. You might, even by accident, experience pleasure; what differentiates one from the other is your motive behind such pleasurable activities. When Christ states that sin begins in the mind, he isn’t joking. You can even take pleasure in NOT having pleasure, a kind of pride.

Let’s all say this boils down to Christians needing temperance and self-control. Still, what greater pleasure is there than to be saved in Christ? The ones experienced on earth give us glimpses, mere flashes, of heavenly pleasure, of a perfect world, of an Eden that has been hidden away. Why deny such things, if done in the proper mode. As such, pleasure isn’t antithetical, but essential. We must rejoice, nay, are commanded as such (Philippians 4:4 ), and we should do so willingly. Joy should be a pleasure in itself; everything just adds to it.

That’s why I play video games, after all – pleasure.

One of the best things about Blazblue is its continual depth; this goes for fighting games in general, but especially this one. Practicing with Tsubaki, I was beginning to realize that a simple 5BB > 2CC > 5CC > 236C > 214B > 22C combos simply didn’t cut it in the majority of situations one might encounter in a match. Let’s say, for example, you have an opponent air dash toward you. This combos will not cover it, but you’ve got quite  a few options to counter. First, 2CC can stop any threat from the air if your opponent pressed buttons. From here, you can go for an air combo, something like j.C > dj. CC > 236A > 214C, which will do quite some damage, or you can go for a variation on the normal ground combo, usually taking the opponent to a corner with a 22x to get charge. Whereas the former get more damage, that’s more recovery time in the air, especially if you go for air charge, but the latter give you enough time, easily, to get 1-2 charges for any further combos. The above can be augmented if you already have charge (236D and 214 C at the air combo’s end, for example, can extend the combo even further, or you can 22x and 236D to move the opponent into the corner). Typing this up, however, took quite a bit longer than an actual match’s outcome, of course; all this knowledge, and obviously a lot more, has to be done on the fly, with decision-making an instantaneous process. The only way to utilize new options, of course, is practice, since the muscle memory you need for such input is enormous (of course, every character has a limit on what combos they can create, but such knowledge comes with time).

Literally, the two ways to get good at Blazblue are such: practice, and play matches. It is simply a time thing, win or lose. No matter how much you study it, total engagement is all you can give to make yourself better. Even then, your best won’t be good enough; somebody out there is always better than you at some point, or at some time of day; you can be the greatest fighting game player in the world (see: Daigo Umehara) and still get 4th place at the biggest tournament in the world (EVO 2011).

Furthermore, mechanics eventually take a backseat to mind games and yomi once both players are equal. What will my opponent do next? How do I counter his offense? What constitutes a good strategy in this matchup? You can be the worst character in the game (I’ll take Vega in SF4 as an example) and still beat top tier if you read the mind of your opponent. You can even lack execution skills and come out on top, or destroy the opponent’s confidence, or frustrate them. These are not part of the video game itself, but the meta-game affects the match at hands. It is a battle of two minds for dominance.

Honestly, fighting games are a weird phenomenon because they require such intense focus for such little reward; there’s no magical “cut-scenes” to tell you you are being rewarded for your work, as modern games tend to filter to us, or “endings” (yeah, they have endings, but who’s paying attention to fighting game stories, really? They’re the context for excellent art design and mechanics; aesthetics serves mechanics, not the other way around) that we care about. There is only the fight.

Can you think of another game type that is, in itself, intrinsically rewarding?

Check out this video from the Tougeki qualifiers. Note the spacing, control, and pace of the match. Watch one character, then the other. You’ll see a LOT of decisions are going on all nearly effortlessly. The beginning of the second round has nearly no attacks being made. The two opponents, who basically went into an all-out melee on the first round, temper themselves in the second. The Noel player has obviously realized his approach last match was too reckless. Both are trying to “bait” the opponent to attack by throwing out pokes – fast, safe moves with long range – to eke out a combo. The Tsubaki player, noting the Noel player’s penchant for airdashes, uses 2CC to get a good deal of damage AND get charge – invaluable for Tsubaki’s more damaging combos. You can tell the first round already displaced the Noel player, who throws out random attacks in hopes of victory. This gives Tsubaki easy combo opportunities. Noel tries a Burst to get out of the combos, but it doesn’t allow for a comeback, and Tsubaki takes the match convincingly. You can see from Round One to Two that one player’s dominating performance has led to their win. Noel got too aggressive in the first round and paid for it. Since Noel is a rush-down character, that’s what she should be doing, but she was entirely predictable, allowing Tsubaki an easy win.

As you can see, two levels of play are going on here. This intensity lends itself to the idea of “flow”. complete and utter engagement in an activity. All your brainpower is involved. It’s really an amazing feeling to perform a difficult combo in a match with absolute no difficulty or reservations. Hard work, in fighting games, is rewarded. But let your guard down for a second (as in, a pet stumbles across your gaze) and you can be on the end of a total beatdown. Fighting games are what video games are all about – overcoming obstacles and reaching goals (in this case, set as “total victory in all matches”, but everybody has to start somewhere).

Why are theologians always talking about narrative in video games? That’s not what they’re about at all! Anyone who plays them – seriously, of course – knows that we play them to challenge ourselves and become better at the game in question, to dominate and master. Multiplayer games give an infinite value for that reason. Fighting games work because of this. Some “RPG”s, not all, fulfill this criteria. The rest, for all intents in purposes, is just background noise; all that is really, intrinsically there is the Game itself. It’s an extension of the human will and desire to dominate and press one’s will on others.

That might sound antithetical to Christianity, of course, but I think it is a case of directing human nature towards a more desirable end, pleasure. I don’t mean pleasure in the sense you might be thinking. That’s for another day, though.

Please, leave comments on this article if you agree/disagree, whatever; I welcome some discussion.