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Gamers Like to Live in Imaginary Worlds

Gamers Like to Live in Imaginary Worlds

Let me tell you about a land that a lot of gamers live in. I call it the land of sunshine and lollipops. This is a land of willfully not understanding. In harsher terms, it’s a land of ignorance. It’s the land you live in when you don’t really understand how a game works, nor do you really want to understand how it works.

When you blindly mash your way through a fighting game, you are living in the land of sunshine and lollipops. When you run into a fray blasting your rocket launcher everywhere and hoping for a kill in a shooter, you are living in the land of sunshine and lollipops. When your only understanding of a sports game is “run toward the goal” and when you play racing games by holding down the gas 100% of the time, you are living in the land of sunshine and lollipops. We all start our gaming careers in the land of sunshine and lollipops.

I call this the land of sunshine and lollipops because it’s a pretty great mental space to be in. Everything about the game is wonderful. Whenever you win, it’s an awesome achievement, even if you don’t know what got you there. If a super move happens, you go crazy! If you find an easily spammable move, you are on the top of the world! Not only that, but anything that makes you lose regularly is either A) an obvious flaw or glitch in the game, or B) an example of people with no life taking the game way too seriously or just playing the game wrong. In the world of sunshine and lollipops, everything begins and ends with you. You aren’t playing to win, you are playing to “have fun” whether or not that means winning. You are fooling around. You are tossing LEGOs back and forth rather than trying to put them together into a coherent sculpture.

The most common attitude that describes the land of sunshine and lollipops is “everything is fine.” Here, all games are perfect as long as you are having fun with them. “Don’t turn off items. They are fine! That’s how the game should be played!”

Nothing should ever change for any reason. Game creators are put on pedestals and exalted as some perfect example of creation. The ideas of imbalance, patching, or being “broken” are almost sacrilege, and changing a game because of these ideas is just another way to make the game less fun for you, and more fun for hardcore players. There is an aversion to change, if not a straight fear of it.

I fault no one for wanting to live in the land of sunshine and lollipops. This land is a happy place where nothing is complicated, no one threatens you, and the only thing you have to do to have fun is play. It’s a land where you really don’t have to think about anything, in a good way. It’s a land where games are perfect and everything is good, and more importantly, you know and understand everything you need to know about gaming. Gaming begins and ends with you.

But once you leave the land of sunshine and lollipops, you can never return. There is a threshold that you can cross that will forever take you out of the world of sunshine and lollipops. This is the threshold of learning how the game works. When you start looking into a game’s underlying systems, the world of sunshine and lollipops fades, leaving you in a much more depressing space.

Here, games are no longer flashy bits of randomness that you sometimes win at. Here, games are cold machines filled with moving parts that you are trying to optimize. You’ll never look at a super move with childish wonder again, because they are no longer anything special. You’ll never run into a crowd with a rocket launcher because you know it’s safer to wait around a corner aiming down the sights of your assault rifle. The wacky and hectic bits of gameplay that you love are replaced with numbers. How many frames can you get that attack off in? How many bullets does it take to kill with this gun? How many seconds will I need to reload? Games become an equation you need to solve.

That’s not to say you don’t have fun in this new world. It’s just that fun is derived from solving that equation. Fun is derived by playing your best, and that means knowing all the numbers, pushing yourself as hard as you can.

You can’t ever go back to the world of sunshine and lollipops. No matter how much you try, mashing away at a game never feels right. If you lose a game due to randomness or an unfair exploit, you feel horrible. When you pick up a new game, it’s only a matter of time before you start learning how to play, figuring out strategies, and trying to push yourself. Once you realize how to build a Magic the Gathering deck, for example, you’ll never make a bizarre 200 card deck that uses every card in your collection again… or at least, that won’t be fun.

Gamers Like to Live in Imaginary Worlds

The land of sunshine and lollipops exists in basically anything we can be passionate about. Gaming, cooking, politics, dancing, there’s always this world of people who are infinitely better than us, using infinitely more technical jargon, and understanding infinitely more core concepts than we do. We all come to a point where we have to decide if we want to stay in the land of sunshine and lollipops forever, or if we’ll leave and see what the more complicated world has to offer.

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