Vidkids

Tom Shippey

• Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict’s Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best, Machines by Martin Amis
  Hutchinson, 128 pp, £5.95, September 1982, ISBN 0 09 047841 X
• Dicing with Dragons: An Introduction to Role-Playing Games by Ian Livingstone
  Routledge, 216 pp, £3.95, October 1982, ISBN 0 7100 9466 3

Agonistic, aleatory, vertiginous, mimetic: those are four classes of game, or more accurately four game-elements which can be combined in different ways to create different genres. Mimetic games, obviously, are games in which the players pretend to be someone or something else. In their developed form we don’t call these ‘games’ any more, but ‘plays’, and furthermore hardly any of us now participate in them. We watch them all the time, and that gives one kind of fun, but the fun of mimesis itself is much rarer – regarded, even, with some suspicion. Charades are no longer popular; and while it’s OK for little boys to run round wearing Liverpool shirts or shouting ‘I’ll be Trevor Francis,’ this is strongly frowned upon for even slightly bigger boys. One remembers the games teacher in Kes who ran the whole football session so he could pretend he was Bobby Charlton. Everybody does this in their heads, just like Walter Mitty, but let it show and it’s classified as perverse, immature, not an acceptable form of fun at all.

Vertiginous games are much simpler and can’t have changed much (except for water-skiing) from their primitive ancestors. They’re games that exploit the thrill of falling, or not quite falling: skating, high-board diving, driving sports-cars, whirling small children round and round and round. Aleatory ones are games with a strong element of chance built in, dice games, card games, most of them dependent on gambling even if it’s only for matches. Finally, agonistic games are games with two sides. Chess is one, football another. They don’t look much alike, but in both you must ‘start fair’, both depend on tactics, and in both, like it or not, a major thrill is not playing or even winning, but beating someone else: ‘beat’ is first recorded with this sense in a sporting context in 1770, with reference (significantly enough) to cricket.

The classification above may not be the best possible – people still don’t theorise about games very much – but it does turn up several points of historical and psychological interest. One is that, over the last couple of centuries at most, the world has turned strongly towards agonistic sports and away from all the others. Football, hockey, volleyball, water-polo:these are the kind of game that people play most all over the world. Even athletics, though it has held out against the trend, is often organised so that it’s club against club, or nation against nation, with points awarded in such a way that track meets can be scored as if they were basketball. What does it mean? Is it a response to crowding and competition? Is it an urge to quantify everything, even failure and success? Surely the team element in all these games shows some kind of parallel with production lines and time-and-motion studies. Whatever the interpretation, it remains a fact that a hundred years ago most people didn’t behave like that, while even this century the idea of playing to a decision, like war-for-fun, has seemed peculiar or abhorrent to some non-Western cultures.

Game styles change. Could they be changing again? That’s the thought which emerges from reading Martin Amis’s Invasion of the Space Invaders, about the microchip games possible only since 1978, and Ian Livingstone’s Dicing with Dragons, an introduction to RPG or Role-Playing Games, these latter theoretically possible ages ago but in fact not invented till 1974. Can that late invention mean something, such as a shift in public taste? And while the advent of the Space Invaders can’t mean anything except that new inventions bring new possibilities, could it do something, like create a shift in public taste? More immediately, what kind of fun do you get from these games and how do they compare with water-skiing, darts or snooker?

Vol. 4 No. 24 · 30 December 1982 » Tom Shippey » Vidkids (print version)
pages 7-8 | 3167 words