I say all of this to provide some context for this statement: My latest playthrough of Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days was an utter failure. This is why I’d argue not playing a game is a valid (if limiting) way of communing with it: to not play a game is to reject its theses fully, to sever the tether and let the screen maintain distance. You will feel for them, at least a little bit, because playing a videogame is sharing your existence with this fictional thing, for a few hours at a time. With varying degrees of success, games can transcend this distancing effect of the screen and impose empathy on the player by connecting them to an entity within the gameworld. My point being, videogames tend to have a tether at their heart. Maybe all games are power fantasies, existence given purpose, even if that purpose is to let things fly into you, a mountain in the void.
Or, maybe, videogames model solipsistic empowerment: the freedom to look around and think “this is all for me” and be right. The world doesn’t move forward not because it’s an objective reality that looks to the player for guidance, but because it’s a perceived reality filtered through our avatar. Perhaps, I thought to myself, that the structure of most videogames: placing the player at the center of a world that doesn’t move forward until they do, isn’t a model of empowerment, but a model of subjectivity. Games model subjective experience, asking the player to take on a role – the role of a soldier, a writer, a pirate, a mountain, a team, an army, a nation – and then invest the player in that experiential model by placing them at the center of it. A game about being a mountain is important.” From that, I managed to parse out an answer to my question: games are about empathy.
One particular perspective on Mountain crossed my mind again and again: a tweet from Ian Bogost, where he says simply that “Games are about experiencing other things. Reading about Mountain didn’t shake my resolve on this point, but I did start contemplating possible commonalities between Mountain and other games, in some futile attempt to find some heart of ‘gameness’. I’ve always abided by a performative definition of videogames: that is, if it calls itself a videogame or feels the need to define itself in terms of the videogame medium (that is, things like Gametrekking’s “notgames”), then it is a videogame. Recently, against my better judgment, I found myself contemplating the iOS game Mountain and, I’m ashamed to admit, what exactly makes a videogame a videogame. Smarter people than me have already done so I touch on its appeal a bit, but I won’t defend its quality here. * Author’s Note: Contrarian opinion time! I consider Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days one of the best shooters of the last generation.