The only problem was that I kept dying midway through the fight. The first time I failed, there was a frustrated outcry. The second time, there was uneven laughter and a few murmurs of disbelief. When I died a third time, Hilary spoke on behalf of the whole group, "Dude, you suck at games."
The sequence isn't all that difficult. You use Crying Wolf's gun to fire charged shots which are capable of taking down a Gekko in one shot. I had impatiently button-mashed my way through this weapon tutorial and didn't realize I could charge the gun. I was instead skulking around trying to use the gun's weakest level attack to clear the area. To the other editors it was a pathetic display, like watching your father guide Mario into a head-on collision with a Goomba over and over again before realizing there's a jump button.
Unlike its creative antecedents, videogames are unique because we assume they require skill. While it's absurd to imagine someone being "good" at watching a movie or reading a book, videogames have a strong legacy of pride in accomplishment. "Can you beat the high score? Can you win the race? Can you complete this level?" said Tom Farrer, producer on Mirror's Edge at DICE. "Achievement is accomplishing something through skill and, often in games, is something that is measured and quantified."
At the most basic level, videogames are a set of rules applied to an abstract setting. Players who learn the rules quickly and efficiently are rewarded with progress, high scores, or competitive victory. "When I started playing multiplayer games with my friends, I had the desire to practice more so that I could be the best out of them," recalls Kamran Siddiqui, a professional competitive gamer and national Need for Speed champion at the World Cyber Games. "Competitive gaming has made me dislike games that don't involve much skill, so if a certain game just looks like I have to repeatedly bash certain buttons – I will not really want to play it."
The culture of the hardcore gamer is built around the notion of skillful play. If you are incapable of competing against more seasoned players, you're experiences are marginalized. You are a "noob." As in any game, the spoils of victory are taunting and derogation of the losing side. That player, or team, has been "owned." In hardcore gaming, the have's are the legion of savy players engaged in the self-validating tasks of dominating others. The phenomenon of leaderboards, achievements, online multiplayer, and sadistic difficulty settings all point to the notion that skill is a necessity in gaming.
"The structure of the rules usually determines the result, however there are exceptions," said Rod Humble, head of EA's The Sims Label."The rules of Bridge, for example, could lead to a cutthroat culture of high competition to rival Poker; but, in fact, its players embrace polite and encouraging behavior. The same goes for golf."
Comparing Bridge to Halo may not seem fair, especially given the age discrepancy between average players of each game. It's hard to imagine a fifty year-old feeling compelled to teabag an opponent after sinking a birdie putt. Humble suggested there may be a mechanical reason that videogames inspire heated competition when compared to other games. "Maybe some of it has to do with pacing," he continued. "The longer the gaps between play the more polite the game is, and less intense."
Another dramatic difference between videogames and more traditional sports and parlor games is the use of fiction. From the earliest MUDD's to Miyamoto's invocation of the damsel in distress in Donkey Kong, many videogames have found the addition of a fictional incentive to draw players into their fabricated environments.
"I'm much more interested in exploring games – checking out their plot, their interesting areas, their mechanics," said Heroine-Sheik's Bonnie Ruberg, a freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Economist, The Village Voice, and The San Francisco Chronicle. "Wimpy as it may sound, I honestly prefer to play games on easy settings, instead of thriving for that accomplished feeling of doing well on hard."
As graphics processing technology has exponentially increased over the last three decades, the ability to couch rule sets in immersive fictional words has expanded. In Fallout 3, for example, player skill is almost beside the point. It's difficult to grasp how many different ways there are to progress through the game. The narrative choices available to the player far outweigh the immediate needs of getting a headshot or flanking the blue team at a capture point. Like many modern games, Fallout 3 is a not about skill and victory, it's about interacting with a fictional experience in a personal way.
The junction point between fictionalized and purely competitive games is where the one common element of artistry in videogames comes into play. Bridge and golf are games with static rule sets but the rule sets are purely competitive. Videogames use rule sets, frequently grounded in competitive conventions, to express something creative. In the same way that film evolved an unspoken system of communication, imbuing meaning in cross-cuts, close-ups, dolly moves, and color temperature, the language of rules communicates an experience to the player.
In Killzone 2, for example, the objectives should be familiar to most shooter fans. Move through a corridor into a combat arena and strategically eliminate all of the enemies then progress to the next area. What's unique is the rule set applied to those objectives. Player movement is weighted and slow; aiming is imbalanced and has an unwieldy sense of momentum. These are rules the designers have laid out for players. In the same way a baseball player is allowed only three strikes to try and make contact with a ball, the player in Killzone 2 is allowed only so much freedom of movement and aiming accuracy to accomplish the relatively simple objectives.
The result is an experience that feels realistic and constrictive. The first few hours of the game are not about inhabiting the armor of a super soldier, but experiencing the vulnerability of a human being burdened with war machinery. If you play a game like this purely for bragging rights and technical mastery, you're blowing past half of the game. Saying you're good at Killzone 2 is like being proud of how quickly you read.
In contrast, Mirror's Edge gives players a relatively forgiving rule set while obfuscating the objectives for a traditional first person game. The main goal in each stage is simple navigation, and the means to do it are the same at the beginning as they are at the end. In traditional shooters, progression is based on weapon availability: players are mechanically empowered for reaching certain checkpoints. The rules in Mirror's Edge communicate an experience of discovery and ascendance. "The onus is on the player to literally develop themselves," said Farrer. "The only barrier to their [skills] is how quickly they can learn to take advantage of them. We didn't want to artificially reward players with new abilities; we wanted them to discover them more organically."
The game designers have removed themselves as much as possible from micro-managing player progression, and designed a series of environments that encourage players to gradually discover what they are capable of for themselves. Players don't win in Mirror's Edge, they are given a gameplay language that allows them to express an impulse for movement, like the instincts for flight in a dream. "Irrespective of the various accoutrements attached to progression, the most rewarding moments are in skilful handling of the core mechanics," noted Farrer.
Perhaps the biggest part of what quantifies skill in a game is the existence of failure, or negative consequences for not obeying the rule set. What happens when that option is removed? "I think it's part of what makes The Sims so intriguing: you cannot lose," said Humble. "Indeed, sometimes things happen that seem, at the time, to be negative but end up being great fun."
The Sims is, arguably, the most popular videogame franchise in the world, and it remains the one game where the idea of skill is most elusive to pin down. Is skill the speed and precision with which you can move a mouse from icon to icon? Is it the ability to memorize a tree of consequences for each play choice? These abilities might be invaluable in games based on pure competition, like StarCraft, but in The Sims they are beside the point.
"I think a great challenge for game designers is to create games that allow great player expression," noted Humble. "In the same way you can have Olivier's Hamlet, it would be wonderful for someone to review the way a player played a certain game."
To stretch that analogy, it could be said that there are then two schools of game skill. The classical gamer is like an actor who delivers her lines in perfect accordance with the script and the will of the director, or game designer. The Peter O'Toole gamer might dance through a round of Halo multiplayer with 40 kills and no deaths. Then there is the method actor who sets aside the intention of the designer and instead tries to personalize the lines and actions to make them honest and immediate. The Marlon Brando gamer would set his dysfunctional Sim on fire at a barbecue while his neighbors watched him burn to death.
"People like to do things and have others appreciate it," said Humble. "It's a great feeling, it's why I design games, I presume it's a factor for you in why you write." Skill in gaming is born from this impulse. Outperforming other players is a crude way of forcing others into appreciating you. When you compete and win, you have concrete proof that nobody is faster and more accurate, no one understands the game map better than you. If others don't appreciate how well you can master a game's fundamental rules, you can force them through dominance.
For me, the experience of a videogame is not about competition. I approach gameplay in the same way I approach language in a novel. I don't want to conquer it; I want to experience it, to fully digest it. I don't internalize failure in a game as invalidation. Listening to my co-workers grow restless and dismissive while watching my performance, I felt the same discomfort you might have when reading a book in a park while an audience heckles you for not turning the pages fast enough.
What does it ultimately mean to be "good" at games? That depends on the individual. Our worth as participants can't be measured against the performance of other people. "I think entertainment as art has become so rich that we all kind of make our own path though the millions of different options," said Humble.
The best gamers, then, aren't busy beating other people. They're the ones shadowboxing with themselves, trading one imaginary ring for another.