Everyone who games has their own reasons for picking up the controller (or mouse), whether it is to escape, because we refuse to read, to hit the pause button, or maybe to compete.  Last week, Matt wrote his reason to game, to be someone else. This week, I share with you why I game. I game to experience things. Not just stand in someone else’s shoes, but to experience events, places, emotions that are not available to me in my normal course of life.  Experience can be a dose of reality in the form of sports games, flight simulators, or economic and world simulators like SimCity.  Experience can also be something of the imagination, fantasy or science fiction worlds, which gaming provides an abundance of.

As a kid, I was never allowed to do the fun stuff that I always wanted to do like play full-contact football, drive, fly a plane or helicopter, shoot a gun, man a tank or gun turret, or travel further than the to the park next to my house.  So, games would serve as a replacement or supplemental experience for many of these things.  Yes, it’s like standing in someone else’s shoes when you fire up a flight simulator, a sports game, or a driving game, but as a 12 year old all of these things are out of reach to you.  You can game to experience something you have only previously read about or watched on TV. Games like Chuck Yeager’s Advanced Flight Trainer, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Falcon 3.0, all gave me the chance to be a pilot.  Silent Service let me battle in a WWII submarine.  Many simulators are used to convey a message of “this is what the real thing will be like” to the user.  The military has used this tactic for many years creating countless flight sims and titles like America’s Army, giving players an idea of what it really is like to be in the military.  Rebel Assault and X-Wing put me up against a Star Destroyer where Lando Calrissian wished he was as cool as me.  It was a total thrill as a kid, it gave me an idea of how the characters in the movies felt. Gaming added a little bit of reality to the mix of a kid’s imagination and favorite dreams, giving chances to experience things in their own way.

Gaming has its own unique way of storytelling that lets the player experience things in a variety of ways. Aside from role-playing, stepping into someone else’s shoes, and watching the story go by, gamers can directly impact the outcome of a storyline, creating a different experience for everyone who plays. Fallout 3 and Fable 2 were recent big hits that explored this area of unique player experiences. In Fallout, every action you make has a karma weighting which will impact how the world reacts to you creating a different experience for every player. Branching storylines, optional quests, and an open world don’t allow for a complete tailor-made experience, but it is varied greatly for most players.

Video games are a fairly young medium which are still developing storytelling methods and capabilities. Players can have a stake in the story, an emotional investment which provides to them a different interpretation than everyone else. The Call Of Duty series has tried to convey the horrors and realities of war to deliver an impact, an emotional experience to the gamer. In COD4, you die. Almost everyone you play with dies in that game. There is no avoiding it. It’s part of the story. You are a Marine, fighting the good fight, saving injured comrades and trying to stop the bad guys, but whoops, you are killed by a nuclear weapon. End of that story. It’s an experience where you play, get attached to your character and feel the end result, be personally impacted as your campaign there is over.

Metal Gear is series that always explored the human element of war and framed the storyline so the player would consider the result of their actions and might realize that being a trained cold bad-assed killer isn’t always what it is cracked up to be.  Another title that is looking to provide a similar type of experience is the recently announced Six Days in Fallujah. Six Days looks to provide an experience of the recent war to you at home. It’s advertised to put you into the war zone, based upon Marine diaries, videos, first hand recollections, and the same from the insurgent side. It’s taking real people’s real life experiences and letting you hear, see, and feel the same things first hand. If done accurately and in an unbiased fashion, Six Days in Fallujah can provide more information and a powerful experience for the player to have a better understanding of those events.  Potentially it can change the way the player thinks.

It is possible these titles are an experience many people don’t want, an experience any sane person probably shouldn’t enjoy, and most likely wouldn’t if they were really there, but to me Six Days screams EXPERIENCE more than it does Entertainment. People may not agree with the experience presented, and they are entitled to that view, just as I don’t agree with the experiences presented in a game BJ took a look at, but you cannot deny that it is there for you to encounter for you choose so. If someone doesn’t agree with the experience of killing, there are many, many titles out there they should avoid playing. If they wish to experience racing or flying, pick up Gran Turismo or Microsoft Flight Simulator. When you think about it, there are many experiences that should horrify a sane person, such as GTA and Manhunt, but these aren’t always created as an experience, they are created for entertainment purposes. To me, gaming isn’t exclusively entertainment. It’s a way to grow your life experience safely from your own home, if you are provided with solid subject matter and are open and willing to interpret what you are presented.

Video games as a medium have provided to me many more experiences than I ever thought were possible. Fifty to one hundred years ago ,most people’s life experiences were limited to their local area. If you lived in the Midwest, you never swam in the ocean. If you lived in the South, you never played in the snow. Farm kids rarely saw the big city, and city kids rarely milked cows. The virtual world has helped knock down some of the barriers and provide interaction and information beyond what a book or television show can provide. All I have done is taken advantage of the wide repertoire of experiences that the global gaming library has provided. I suggest you to do the same, and share what experiences you have encountered while gaming.

[Why We Game is a weekly feature from Loot Ninja discussing the various reasons we each have for playing video games. If you have a reason you want to see covered, let us know.]