My gaming kryptonite, and the interesting implications thereof

So, I'm going to lay bare a piece of Unfortunate Gaming Truths. There's a type of game that's like crack to me, the kind of game that lures me in for just one round at eight o' clock, then I stumble home exhausted at two in the morning. When anyone asks where I've been, I stammer "The office."

My most recent gaming mistress is Card Hunter, but there's a storied lineage stretching back to Civ5, League, and TF2. What's interesting here is that these games aren't the games I want to play: My ideal games have wildly original gameplay, an immersive story or theme, or are otherwise semi-pretentious art or indie games.

Which brings me to a realization about the games that own my soul: They don't give me what I think I want, they don't give me the real experience. I get hooked on games most because of how I experience them, not how they actually are.

To put this a different way, these games could be the Matrix, or Plato's shadow puppets. Things like Civ5's early gameplay are a perfect example: I'm not actually tactically engaged, I'm playing mostly by muscle memory. I've got a bandit camp nearby, so do this, or I'm on an island, so do that. I get the satisfaction of thinking that I'm smart, but all I've done is trot out non-complex solutions to the same problem. This lets me stay in a hazed, tuned-out relaxation mode, but still feel challenged.

Compare that to games that are actually tactical. Transitioning to the mid-game in Civ5 adds layers of complexity, and I rarely end up thinking too deeply about how to win a game of League. If I have to start thinking like that, it calls up a different part of my brain, and makes me sit up and pay attention. So much for the high, it's time to sober up.

Even though I'm more engaged with that kind of challenging gameplay, it's not as fun or relaxing, so I shy away from those games. So what's important, then, isn't that I'm challenged -- it's that I think I'm being challenged. In fact, because I (like most people) like to fill bars and complete milestones, it's actually better for a game to fake-challenging than to actually put up a fight.

In another case, most of the games that hate to see me alone on a night like this are round-based PvP. Here again, perception is key, almost like a Turing test. I found myself quitting out of a Card Hunters arena match because it was against a computer, rather than PvP. My issue was not anything to do with playing a computer, because AI is so good I can't tell the difference. I wasn't looking at chat for conversation. It was exclusively the knowledge that I wasn't playing against another person, which made the game feel less worthy.

The trick being, AI opponents can provide a much better experience, especially if they're programmed with the above point in mind, that the perception of challenge is better than actual challenge. An AI opponent can throw the match at just the right time, or ramp up difficulty to match your play. With an AI opponent, the game designer can build exactly the narrative that makes a player want to keep playing. We still match players versus players, but I can't see any reason to have to do this, and plenty of benefits to having PvE masquerade as PvP.

I'm not going to advocate for us all to unshackle ourselves from staring at the wall of Plato's cave, or demand that game devs not manipulate our gaming experiences. AIs would be a damned sight better than dealing with some League players, for one thing, and a grand strategy game with adaptive difficulty would be brilliant.

What I will say, though, is that those of us who want gaming to push its limits as an art form should be playing games that way. Don't just go through the motions, don't get a seven-round itch. If you want to play something genuinely fresh and challenging, make sure you're both playing games that reward that, and that you're playing those games in that way. Don't go looking for a top-tier game experience while you're mentally checked out.

If you just want to relax or hang out with friends, though, embrace that. If I could have a Smash64 opponent right now that played as well as a human being, it wouldn't matter if they were actually a computer, so long as I never found out. Figure out how you'll have the most fun, then take that design philosophy into the dev studio. We can nudge players in 4X games without making the game completely linear, give them the experience that's most fun.