Truly human games: September 30, 1996 issue of New Thinking

September 30, 1996 New Thinking:
Truly human games

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September 30, 1996

Truly human games

By Gerry McGovern

I’m trembling slightly. The All-Ireland Football final has just ended. Meath beat Mayo by one single point. I wanted Mayo to win, so I feel a bit despondent, depressed.

It would have been important for Mayo to win, because this was much more than a game. Gaelic football goes to the core of Irishness. Pride in your country, pride in your county, pride in your parish, pride in who you are.

A game where no player ever makes a penny. Where everything is professional, where huge effort in training is expended, all for the glory of wearing your county’s jersey, and winning that All-Ireland medal.

Mayo come from the province of Connacht, a place badly hit by emigration. Mayo hadn’t won an All-Ireland in over forty years. A Connacht team hasn’t won one in over twenty. People will be very depressed in Connacht tonight. They badly needed the boost of victory.

A great thinker, Konrad Lonenz, once made the point that we are only truly human when we play. I know what he meant. Children, particularly, learn through play, by simulating real scenarios, where they can see what happens when an action is taken, without usually having to bear the full cost of a bad decision.

As adults, play gives us room to express ourselves in a physical way that is not generally open in the grind of daily living. As supporters, we get a license to make fools of ourselves if we so wish, and be forgiven. Play brings us closer to our physical nature and deepest emotions.

I have often wondered what the popularity of games like Doom/Quake mean. It would seem that they reflect a deep-seated blood-thirst in the young male of our time. I think that we can look at this blood-thirst in two ways.

We can accept that modern society in reality gives very little room for the young (urban, white) male to express their more physical and destructive side, and that games like Doom are a release.

We can also look at games like Doom and say that they greatly de-sensitize young males. That they are not so much a release but rather a well from which destructiveness and violent tendencies are flowered and bloom.

Whatever point you take, remember that it’s never ‘only a game.’ Games either act as a releaser or a trainer.

The environment that most computer games exist within is essentially primitive. Although often inventive within restrictive parameters, the worlds created are limited and limiting. The environment consists generally of rooms or corridors. The figures are blocky, with little or no physical or emotive expression.

Perhaps it is the primitive environment which game developers must work within that pushes them towards creating primitive games, with simple rules: to kill or be killed. Perhaps when the computer environment and cyberspace in general expands and achieves more depth, we will see the creation of games which rely more on brain than on joy-pad brawn.

We progressed out of the caves because we used the range of our intelligence. Let us hope that as cyberspace grows, our young males in particular will find the opportunity to express themselves in more complex, expressive and constructive ways.

Gerry McGovern

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The environment that most computer games exist within is essentially primitive.