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author: admin
generator: pandoc
title: 'Let''s Play'
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---
admin
2012-11-16T16:24:34+00:00
[{.alignleft
.wp-image-211 width="164"
height="168"}](http://doubledashgames.com/subdomains/exportingblogs/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/752px-snes-sfam-controllers.jpg)I
suppose YouTube has done a great many number of things, and (as
undoubtedly for other interest-groups) for the 'gaming community' one of
those things has been to provide a platform for a new way of doing an
old thing: watching someone else play a game.
As my university studies this year have slowly transformed into a turgid
mess, I've sat in on a few 'Let's Plays': hours long recordings of
someone simply playing through a game, and talking over the top of the
footage.
What's suddenly struck me about these kinds of YouTube 'shows' is that
they form an intensely interesting phenomenological experience. I've
come to realise that watching someone complete a game from start to
finish is an epic journey. I suppose what makes a Let's Play different
from the age-old real-life couch experience is that it's almost as if
you're the person playing the game on the screen  --- it's as if the
viewer constitutes a kind of  higher cognitive process of a single mind.
One part of the mind actually plays the game, and the footage of this
game is transmitted to the other half, which sits there and evaluates
the results.
Take this for an example. I decided to watch a Let's Play of *Zelda 2*
for the purpose of writing an earlier post on the game (as I had only
ever been able to complete half of it), and the childhood memories that
were evinced during the process of recording the (difficult) game
mingled with the player's more recent, immediate experiences of work and
other mundane everyday activities, and this gave the play-through of the
game this insane level of depth. In a significant portion of the Let's
Play, the player went from talking about work, to divulging a memory
about when he was a child, making up nonsensical names for the enemies
on the screen with his sister --- the entire series of vidoes having
been filmed over a couple of months, hearing the player relate
significant memories (sometimes the same ones, repeatedly) to his
seemingly unchanging present life gave the impression that you could
detect what made his life important, worth living.
It strikes me that the level of access that *anyone* can have into a
person's existential tribulations when they watch Let's Play signifies
something very profound about gaming as an art-form. It's been recently
announced in Australia, by the Federal Government, that a modest sum of
money (20m AUD) will be spent on the game industry. The government cited
that they were doing this because they believed that gaming presented
itself as a logical extension of other art-forms like film, photography
and painting. This should of course present itself as a very welcome
gesture to the gaming 'industry'/'community', but I think that what
Let's Plays reveal about art in general is that the communication of
meaning (through art) must harbour anarchic and spontaneous elements to
its eventuation. Because the technology was there, thousands of people
got to peer into the life of this person because they decided to sit
down and play a game and talk about their life. As a result, I believe
that they probably gained a whole new perspective on a game they had
understood in a previously other, particular way.
The recent publicised decision by the government to, in a small way,
fund game development in Australia can probably also be better
understood by contrasting the above with the results of Let's Plays that
feature people playing *bad* games. I suppose when I refer to 'bad'
games I really mean a specific kind of game, one developed and marketed
primarily for the purpose of making money. The phenomenology of playing
a bad game is unlike the placid, nostalgic experience of playing a
well-worn childhood game. The frustration, exasperation and
disappointment of being unable to comprehend, or progress in a game
shuts out the viewer's access to the player's reflection on their
existence, and forces them to focus entirely on how they're reacting to
the game being played. A poorly developed game is an affront to a
player's senses; it seems impossible for a someone to lull into a domain
of psychological security when their access to the virtual reality of a
game is unintuitive.
In this regard, when it comes to this kind of funding from the
government for game development, such an initiative is almost
meaningless. Let's Plays provide a convenient demonstration why. The
funding from the government won't mean anything for Australian gaming
unless it transforms our "community's" process of collectively
constructing (developing, inventing, processing...) meaning around our
games, unless it makes the Australian game *praxis* more
'dynamic'. Perhaps best put simply, if that twenty mil results in a
couple new games with which everyone is mildly pleased, but then forgets
(no matter how much money it makes), then it's wasted money. The
announcement is probably more important. It's [gotten gamers
talking](http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/11/what-does-20-million-of-federal-funding-mean-for-the-australian-games-industry/)
about 'Australian' games, and that's probably good enough.\_
\_
The particular way a player went about interacting with channel
subscribers in order to solve a puzzle in *Spyro 1*Â in another Let's
Play can serve as yet another example of what is most important about
gaming as an art-form (I can think of at least another three or four
examples). The way players discover tricks and short-cuts in games and
pass them on --- in a seemingly organic manner --- between themselves
illustrates the *essence* of art, language\_Â \_&c: where there was
originally intended to be one meaning, there now exists the potential
for an infinite number of meanings. It seems that there exists, when a
game is played, an over-determination of meaning. With respect to this
Let's Play, the particular player involved had spent their entire
childhood never understanding how to reach certain platforms in certain
levels, because two or more different perspectives of those platforms
were needed in order to understand where they were placed in their
respective levels. Varying conflicting, but equally valid suggestions
about how to reach those platforms were proffered up by viewers.
(As an aside, I now have a new appreciation for *Spyro*; the entire game
consists of trying to get to higher and higher platforms in order to
explore all of the space that exists --- I've never played \_Spyro
2 \_or *3*, hopefully I'll find that they build cleverly on this
concept, because it truly is a beautiful one.)
I think what all of this (*Zelda 2*, *Syro*, 20 million dollars) means
is that gaming and art is all about what communication and meaning
really are.