[Collectors] want to achieve personal recognition, [to] preserve and understand the past of their collections, [to] share their efforts, experiences and stories, [to] connect with people with similar interests, and most importantly, to express themselves through their collections.
Wei Zhou, U.I. designer.
One of the highlights at the Baltimore Museum of Art is the Matisse catalogue in the prestigious Cone collection. The Cone sisters, through an inheritance amassed from the textile and grocery industry, collected over 500 works by the artist. When the surviving sister, Dr. Caribel Cone, passed away, she left the entirety of the coveted collection to the museum.
A tour through a replicated room of the sisters’ home shows a sample of their vast collection, a collection that extends beyond traditional fine art and into international bric-a-brac. The sisters converted every available space in their home to display or store their collection—they emptied out dresser drawers to store postcards, keys from the Renaissance to the 19th century, and hand embroidered Turkish towels. However, the aesthetic sophistication of their collection resembles what some may consider a hoarding addiction. Dr. Caribel Cone, aware of this compulsion, wrote,
Now that I stop to reason about it, it is silly foolishness, this collecting of things. But it must have some solid foundation—some foundation deep in the hearts of people… it is the craving of beauty that is such a vital foundation of the human soul.
The Cone sisters’ collecting patterns show a personal connection with this “craving for beauty”—one sister collected prints and drawings because of her interest in the artistic process, while the other sister focused on an artist’s main body of work. This personal stake in their collection made the Cone sisters collectors, not completists.
A collector seeks meaning and self-expression through the treasure, and, therefore, is discerning about what he or she collects and displays in the treasure room. The collector skips the buffet, and opts for the menu. The treasures were selectively chosen by the player because of an intimate and personal connection between the treasures, the world, and the player.
A completist, unlike a collector, gathers without meaning. The tasks and trophies have meaning only in the completion of the task itself—an impulse to hoard for the sake of hoarding. It is about satisfying an addiction.
So, whether a game is ethical must be determined by how and where the game places its players in relation to its goal-reward system. Does the game’s goal-reward system treat its players as collectors or completists?
There is something morally and ethically questionable with an interactive experience that devalues the intrinsic value of life, by reciprocating substantial investment of human hours with empty and story-less tasks. Part of the appeal for these games, and the case that can be made for them, is that the interaction allows players to feel omniscient over a world that was meant to be a plaything to begin with. Philosophically, some people will disagree with the collector vs. completist distinction because they feel that story is a secondary concern over the actual game play. Or they agree with Margaret Robertson’s position that games don’t need extensive stories to be fun, appealing, and ultimately, successful. On a practical scale, video game stories serve a less central role than in the other established mediums. Knowing the story enriches one’s understanding of the purpose and meaning of the game’s play, but a story is not a requirement to experience the joy of the play itself.
Many of the recent sandbox games, however, are focused on story-less tasks and achievements. All the goals in those games either consist of a series of repetitive tasks that exist for completing achievements or for obtaining power-ups and points for additional abilities needed to complete main-story missions. For example, in Infamous, Prototype, Red Faction, and Assassin’s Creed, the player is asked to participate in a limited number of repetitive tasks. While they all involve taking care of a problem in the game-world, the tasks exist not only as an excuse to demonstrate the various game mechanics, but also as story-less tasks that involve no genuine human and intimate connection to the world—there is only the thrill of completion.
To put a human face to this issue, as of June 2009, Red Faction and Prototype have sold 199,000 copies and 420,000 copies respectively. The average life expectancy of an American male (not purposefully excluding women here, but picking one demographic for the sake of simplifying the math) is approximately 78 years, and there are 8,765 hours in a year. If a player on average spends 20 hours on the game and its completist and story-less tasks, then Red Faction has wasted the equivalent of six human lives and Prototype has wasted the equivalent of 14 human lives.
A successful collector game gives its players quests instead of tasks—every goal has a unique and involving story that creates an intimate and empathetic link between the player and the game world. When you create that link, the player pursues the play out of a personal conviction and emotional investment that he or she can make an individual impact on the game world. By completing the quest the player creates meaning for the person that he or she is within that world.
The best collector games, such as Oblivion and Grand Theft Auto IV, commit involving and engaging stories to all of their available tasks. These stories define the world and its characters, and place you within a context where your actions and rewards have consequences and meaning. They are games that understand that side-quests, like diverging episodes in a TV show, must be more than just simple tasks—each side quest has to have its own life, its own lore—just like the real world, the stories in our periphery have a life of their own, but games can make those stories accessible to us.
The addition of stories should not be read as a push for authored and directed games that wall in the player into specific and preordained experiences. Stories should serve, not as walls, but as boundaries; and boundaries allow player created narratives to happen as players subvert and exploit a game’s formal structure. Story structure should properly define the context of the required player action with believable characters and scenarios, which makes player created narrative prosper within that story space. Story gives context, and it defines the player’s purpose and motivation.
Within that discussion is a deeper spiritual and human question: why do we do the things we do, and what is the ultimate worth and purpose of those actions? Gamers often demand a large number of tasks for longer hours of gaming, but the available hours of game play should not, and do not, define the overall value of a game’s experience. While our own personal compulsions and psychological make-up determine our susceptibility to addiction, developers can take practical and holistic steps to avoid creating completist games. Otherwise, everything that players do becomes a meaningless and perfunctory task.
The irony of the Cone collection is that as the museum dismantled and reorganized the collection to provide the Baltimore public a carefully curated guide through Matisse’s career, the personal motivation and expression of the sisters became moot. Who they were is ultimately unknowable—but their pursuit, given to the world, is returning an interactive aesthetic experience gratis to an entire city.
Unlike the Cone collection, what we gamers gather is deeply ingrained in competition, and embedded in self-promotion. But I believe story can act as a redemptive tool to make us care about things and issues that exist outside of our achievements. That is what I look for in every aesthetic experience: to find a way to exert myself beyond my limited perceptions, and to be thrown forward into the lives of the universal feelings and thoughts shared by people. Collector based games, for me, maintain the illusion that games are not about systems or tasks, but about other people.
Information about the Cone sisters taken from a Baltimore Museum of Art brochure titled, “Seeing with Fresh Eyes: Matisse in the Cone Collection.”
Thanks to Jason Labbe, who pointed out the distinction between completists and collectors, and Kristina Drzaic for her correspondences on the joy of play.
