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In the 1950s and 60s there was a whole series of films that asked the same fundamental question: what the hell are we doing when we go to the cinema? Hitchcock's Rear Window, Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, are all about the process of viewing and interpreting, often with a distinctly voyeuristic undertone. It's as though film-makers of the era were suddenly having a sort of existential crisis about their craft, and their audiences. Hang on, they were saying, what the hell are these things we make and why do people want to see them?I think games are going through something very similar at the moment. The rise of experiential titles like Gone Home and Dear Esther, the dawn of expressive and autobiographical indie games (especially on the Twine platform), and the transformation of mainstream triple-A titles into glorified Hollywood blockbusters has led to something of a dislocation. Developers are worrying about what a game actually is and what the fundamental elements are - and audiences are joining in with the scuffle. As we've seen over the last year, a type of culture war has exploded between gamers who have a certain idea about what these things are for (Fun and shooting) and - on the other side - artists, designers and media critics who hold to a very different philosophy and set of references, and who have begun to expand their own definitions This, as far as I'm concerned, is fascinating, and it says a lot about how important games have become.
And this is why I cannot call games a hobby. I know, I know, a lot of people do - and that's fine, it's up to them. I just think they're sort of wrong. Now please, I don't really want to get into dictionary definitions of the word 'hobby'. That's because heading into an argument with a dictionary definition is a bit like complaining that a particular parody of Star Trek can't be funny because it mentions the wrong version of the Starship Enterprise - it's really quite boring, and it trivialises the discourse in a smug and reductive way. I suppose that, to me, a hobby is something that we enjoy, that we spend time on, but that doesn't necessarily tie in to other areas of our lives, or how we perceive the wider world. It is a discreet enjoyment, and its meaning can be almost superfluous.
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