Here below I wrote that I consider games as an hybrid media and that the learning experience should be the discovery of oneself.
Now I’m reading an article from Will Wright that mirrors many of these fundamental points:
Games cultivate – and exploit – possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn’t the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.
Like the toys of our youth, modern videogames rely on the player’s active involvement. We’re invited to create and interact with elaborately simulated worlds, characters, and story lines. Games aren’t just fantasy worlds to explore; they actually amplify our powers of imagination.
The same transformation is happening in games. Early computer games were little toy worlds with primitive graphics and simple problems. It was up to the player’s imagination to turn the tiny blobs on the screen into, say, people or tanks. As computer graphics advanced, game designers showed some Hollywood envy: They added elaborate cutscenes, epic plots, and, of course, increasingly detailed graphics. They bought into the idea that world building and storytelling are best left to professionals, and they pushed out the player. But in their rapture over computer processing, games designers forgot that there’s a second processor at work: the player’s imagination.
Games have the potential to subsume almost all other forms of entertainment media. They can tell us stories, offer us music, give us challenges, allow us to communicate and interact with others, encourage us to make things, connect us to new communities, and let us play. Unlike most other forms of media, games are inherently malleable.
Games are evolving to entertain, educate, and engage us individually. These personalized games will reflect who we are and what we enjoy. They will allow us to express ourselves, meet others, and create things that we can only dimly imagine. And more than ever, games will be a visible, external amplification of the human imagination.
Which means: a personal form of expression.
The goals in a game shapeshift from functional (and objective) to metaphorical (and subjective). Symbolic. It isn’t anymore a custom path from A to B. But it’s instead a “slice of world” that you can then model as you want. Following your “imagination” as the displacement that exists between the world of forms and the world of ideas. Games become not just “lessons” to figure out, not just “packaged experiences” but a form of discovery and expression of individuality.
We sublimate to the world of the ideas, toward the culture, its myths and what we absorb from those. Our personal elaboration and interiorization. Our symbols, our sensibility, our presence. A form of communication.
This is an essential evolution.
From my point of view the “roleplay” isn’t one of the patterns available in a game. But the only one complete. The one more powerful and effective. The one that “reaches” more. That communicates better and without “language” barriers. Universal.
Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it – and it plays these games in different ways. Just watch a kid with a new videogame. The last thing they do is read the manual. Instead, they pick up the controller and start mashing buttons to see what happens. This isn’t a random process; it’s the essence of the scientific method. Through trial and error, players build a model of the underlying game based on empirical evidence collected through play. As the players refine this model, they begin to master the game world. It’s a rapid cycle of hypothesis, experiment, and analysis.
I believe this process works at best when it happens through the immersivity. Where we remove the filters and let express the player the way he like, in that particular context that was offered.
The immersion in an environment. Free to our interpretation and individual perception of it (and ourselves within it).
I see mmorpgs as the best way to explore these possibilities.