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Culture Clash August10

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Every month, Matthew Sakey discusses culture-oriented issues of gaming, ranging from the evolution of critical language for understanding the new medium to the culture of gaming and how the nongaming public perceives the industry.

 
The Other M
Play and memory  (August 2010)
By Matthew Sakey

 

Memory is a funny thing. It never works the way we expect it to, and surprises us in unusual ways sometimes. Consider a conversation I recently had:
 
PETE: Matt, have you finished Starcraft 2?
 
ME: No, not yet.
 
MCSHANE: How is it?
 
ME: Pretty good. It’s Starcraft. I mean it’s the exact same game.
 
MCSHANE: DOOM 3 was the exact same game as DOOM, I got sick of it when the first monster closet opened. It sucks that it’s the same game.
 
ME: I think they didn’t want to offend the Koreans. But it’s not that big a deal here. It’s… like… the fundamentals of Starcraft still work. The fundamentals of DOOM don’t. You don’t really hold it against Starcraft 2 for being Starcraft.
 
PETE: Is it a continuation of the story? (Pete played through Starcraft once, eleven years ago, and never touched it again).
 
ME: Uh-huh, I’ve gotta deal with that Queen of Blades lady.
 
PETE: Kerrigan.
 
ME: Yeah. And the dude who was in love with her is all gloomy and alcoholic now.
 
PETE: Raynor.
 
MCSHANE: Didn’t you only play through that game once, like, eleven years ago?
 
* * *
 
After 35 years on this earth, I often find myself mystified by what I do and don’t remember about my life. The specificities, triggers, and distance between present day and some of my odder memories. More than a decade of hard living has turned my mind into swiss cheese. I can’t remember what I wore yesterday; I need Outlook reminders for anniversaries and birthdays. Yet I recall with absolute clarity some of the irrelevant conversations I had with townspeople in Phantasy Star 2, and that it’s after the battle with Army Eye that you meet Tyler and Palm gets destroyed, and that you need the Mogic Cap, not the Magic Cap, to talk with people on Dezo. I remember that Luna’s first healing spell in Lunar was called “Little Litany.” I remember that Thar and Luther were two minor villains who usurped the town of Malaga in Sword of Vermilion, and how they did it, and why. These are not significant aspects of those games, yet in my brain they remain.
 
Some months ago I played through – beginning to end – Rygar on an NES emulator (sorry), in one try. I haven’t even thought about that game in twenty years. If you’ve ever played Rygar, you know what a feat that is. It’s not due to some supernatural ability with video games (ask anyone who’s creamed me in Frozen Synapse), it was… memory. I remembered. And yet last week, I forgot to roll my recycling and garbage out to the curb for collection, and as a result my garage smells like rotting cat food. This week I forgot to wash my socks even though I’d explicitly reminded myself to do so that very morning, so I had to attend a big meeting in dirty socks.
 
Now, the obvious response is that we remember things that are pleasant and forget things we either don’t care about or don’t want to deal with. That is true, of course, but looking past the obvious we see further reinforcement for the value of games as learning tools. It goes beyond simple memory, like “I remember playing Q-Bert.” Everyone remembers playing Q-Bert. But remembering names and places, sequences of events, impetus for actions, stuff like that – teachers wrestle for years getting kids to retain that stuff.It also speaks to the importance of play in our lives. Because in many cases the memories are tied to positive emotions – implying that play is something uniquely special, more humanistically important than taking out the trash.
 
Apparently the mind’s garbage-collection routines are supremely efficient, much more so than you might realize. After life-or-death situations, studies suggest that the brain freeze-frames everything about the experience, creating the illusion that the event lasted much longer than it actually did – the whole “time slows down in a crisis” concept. Experiments say that the brain doesn’t react more quickly or perceive with greater celerity, it just remembers more clearly. So presumably the mind could do that all the time; it just doesn’t bother because your memory would quickly become burdened by pointless flotsam. And while no video game has ever recreated the same life or death record-everything experience, it’s notable that in play, memories seem more profoundly made and more deeply etched.
 
We also know sensory input triggers memory. The chlorinated smell of swimming pools reminds me forcefully of Metroid. I was twelve and on the swim team when that game came out, so strategies were discussed between laps. Snowy nights evoke the King Orgnum’s Coffer quest in The Elder Scrolls: Arena, because I stayed up all night to finish it and took a walk in the snow around my college dorm at 3:00 a.m. I remember that it was called “King Orgnum’s Coffer,” which is a pretty extraneous thing to recall when you think about it. My friend Pete remembers not just the tragic love affair between Kerrigan and Raynor, but their names, even though it’s been eleven years.
 
This means something. I’m not certain what, but it does. That moments of games can insert themselves so far into our minds that we’ll never forget certain aspects is something that bears investigation by Learned People. Developer Cesar Castro wonders whether the strong memories and hours committed to the games of the past are limited to history – will we have such memories of today’s games? We can’t know until a decade or so down the line, when today’s games are yesterday’s. It might be that greater complexity and richness will somehow diminish the medium’s retainability, but I doubt it. The power of gaming memories may be the best proof we have that play is sacred.
 

Matts Bio

Matthew Sakey is a professional writer, designer, and interactive media analyst. In addition to writing the monthly Culture Clash column for the IGDA website, Matt also maintains the popular gaming and entertainment site www.tap-repeatedly.com. His work has appeared in several other publications, Games for Windows: the Official Magazine, Develop, The Escapist, Game Developer, and Play Meter. Matt serves as an industry consultant and analyst, working with developers on story and gameplay, educators on curricula for game studies, and corporate clients seeking to leverage games-based technology for e-Learning. For more information, visit www.matthewsakey.net or email matthewsakey@comcast.net.

© 2010 Matthew Sakey. All rights reserved.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily represent the IGDA.