“Your community is your home. Live in harmony in an environment hostile to all civilizations.”
— from the Caravan Sandwitch website
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Being In the Game World
As a therapist, I explore my clients perspectives. This is part empathy and part curiosity. When one client spoke about diverting themself from business and family using a video game, I thought I should try it myself.
Compared to the teenagers I know, my counseling clients spend zero time playing games. You might think this is obvious because video games are designed for teenagers, but many games are targeted at young adults.
Teens spend an inordinate amount of time playing online games. Online games provide a kind of socializing that doesn’t suit adults. These games support real-time collaboration, action, violence, and teen-oriented sexuality drawn from Japanese Anime and superhero stereotypes. Online gaming compensates for teens’ inherent immobility as they rely on their parents for moving around.
Many games target adult interests. Adults control their own mobility, so these games offer less social interaction and more action and puzzle themes. In this regard, board games attract adults because adults can get together more easily. Single player video games involving strings of short themes are well suited to players who have many small windows of time.
Adult games also focus more on social issues and plot development. There is also a kind of middle range that incorporates both adult and adolescent themes, combining sexuality, action (usually violent), and social attitudes. The famous Grand Theft Auto video game, first released in 1997, was shocking in this regard. The franchise continues to produce new versions targeted at the same audience. Adults have since gotten used to the violence. Games of this kind spawned the video game rating system.
Rating and Ranking
A glimpse of how video games are rated can be seen from the ratings assigned to them:
- Everyone
- Everyone 10+
- Teen
- Mature
- Adults Only
These categories refer to what’s morally and not intellectually required. In addition, there are the thematic categories (from Wikipedia) of:
- Action
- Action-adventure
- Adventure
- Puzzle
- Role playing
- Simulation
- Strategy
- Massive Multiplayer Online
- Sandbox/Open World
Each of these has a dozen subgenres.
Board games are described differently, leaning more toward being ranked by their playing quality and less rated for their appropriateness. A typical ranking of board games (from bombardgames.com) uses these 10 criteria:
- Time spent playing
- Number of alternative strategies
- Thought per turn
- Experience needed to win
- Expense
- Amount to learn
- Difficulty learning
- Sessions until competent
- Number of supporting players
- Range of the target audience
In literature, science, and art novelty is recognized and considered primary. You might think that in an industry focused on play, there would be more focus on what’s creative. Novelty is not a game criterion. Games are expected to break down into the existing categories regardless of their novelty.
Involvement Versus Immersion
When I play games it’s not to win but to explore. I’ve spent far more time designing than playing games. My interest in game designs is more to avoid what’s been done before.
In fine arts one can be a creator or a consumer, but these are quite different with a lot of separation between them. Making good art is hard and rarely appreciated, so most people involve themselves in crafts.
Most people read, and while many people write, few people write professionally. I read a lot for information but rarely for entertainment. I write a lot. Games fall between art and literature, between fictional whimsey and nonfictional simulation.
My client’s mention of video games coincided with a video game review in the New York Times that leaned toward adult games. It mentioned the expansive and unusual games Jusant and Caravan Sandwitch, puzzle games that reviewers lauded for being creative and playable.
Lacking a gaming computer, I lowered my expectations, but my son has a Nintendo Switch which offers good performance for any title that runs on it. I bought Caravan Sandwitch for CA$30. It’s a six chapter, 6 to 10 hour game.
Caravan Sandwitch, which I’ll abbreviate as “CS,” is subtyped as a “cozy game,” described as a video game genre characterized by its focus on relaxation, comfort, and a low-pressure, stress-free experience. I spent 6 hours on the first chapter alone. I didn’t find it particularly “low stress,” but then I’m not 14, and I’m unaccustomed to video game play, which is unquestionably a skill.
I told myself I would stop playing the game after finishing chapter one, then chapter two, and finally chapter three. By that time I’d seen how the game was designed, got the basic plot, could navigate most of the mechanics, and roughly understood the rewards that lay ahead.
At that point the novelty wore off. There was diminishing attraction to offset the time, labor, and minutiae required for puzzles ahead. I started watching YouTube play-through videos. This changes the video game experience to something more like watching a movie. It relieved me from the laborious sidetracking required for learning relevant thematic details.
As Dylan McCarthy says in a review of CS at Impulsegamer.com:
“Until the point where I found myself tired of visiting the same points of interest, the air of feeling like an adventurous child who can travel and climb wherever they want without consequence felt incredibly refreshing in a way I didn’t know I needed.”
Tolerance, Relevance, and Education
Whether or not you approve of their content, video games target social themes. They may not be what you’re interested in, but you may not be their target audience.
Video games target people who have grown up on video games. Their purpose is not to teach, it’s to entertain, but you cannot avoid having your thoughts encouraged by what you see. So, regardless of their purpose, games encourage specific kinds of thinking.
Despite its “cozy” moniker, CS’s plot sharply points toward social cohesion, corporate malfeasance, and ecological destruction. Its plot is revealed through snippets of first-person dialog scattered between treasure hunts, landscape exploration, puzzle solving, collecting useful objects, and the involvement of many characters whose roles are initially uncertain.
Having something through which you can project your frustrations is another reason to play games. Encouraging ideas and releasing frustrations is the soil in which video games grow.
Bénédicte Coudière’s commented on CS in a piece published at pontnthink.fr and titled “Collapse Is Not Inevitable”. It should be noted CS is a French game, which most reviewers seem to overlook. It is culturally different from what you’d expect from something produced in the US, UK, JP, or AU. For those of you who are sensitive to subtle culture, this adds another layer of interest.
“You know that feeling … of emptiness you want to avoid… finishing the game, changing the world. And we don’t want to do that… The game hangs… in a precarious but controlled balance between utopia and dystopia, collapse and new beginnings… trying to rebuild yourself after the tragedy, and also to escape… of simply being lost. Lost little people, robots to gather, data to retrieve from oblivion… It is through the absence and remnants of this excessive exploitation that… your relationship with the world is built.”
Life as a Game
This brings up the subject of games as therapy, related to the article titled,“The Psychological Importance of Wasting Time.” Let’s use the game ranking system to profile your personality. First, translate these game properties into personality properties:
| Game Ranking | Personal Growth Criteria |
|---|---|
| 1-Time spent playing | How much time do you spend working on yourself? |
| 2-# of alternative strategies | Number of alternative approaches to your issues? |
| 3-Thought per turn | How thoroughly do you think about opportunities? |
| 4-Experience needed to win | Do you have the experience you need? |
| 5-Expense | How expensive is your lifestyle? |
| 6-Amount to learn | What’s the amount you need to learn? |
| 7-Difficulty learning | How hard are your lessons? |
| 8-Sessions until competent | How much more learning do you think you need? |
| 9-Number of supporting players | Do you have enough support? |
| 10-Range of the target audience | Are you surrounded by the right people? |
Ranking ranges from 1 to 5. For games, this is relative to other games. Personal growth criteria can also range from 1 to 5 but the scale is different. One now means little and 5 means a lot relative to your life or that of most people.
Let’s make a diagram to compare games with our lives. Draw 5, equally spaced, concentric circles. Divide and number this “dart board” in 10 equal slices. Rate yourself from 1 to 5 on each criteria and place a dot in each slice, with 1 placed in the innermost circle and moving outward for higher numbers. Connect the dots around the circle to get what’s called a “spider web” diagram.
In the below table I show the values given to two popular games: chess and monopoly. I’ve taken the values for chess and monopoly from the bombard games.com website. Then, I’ve added my own values. Finally, I’ve left a column blank for you to enter the values that apply to your life.
| Game Ranking (values 1 to 5) | Chess | Monopoly | Me | You? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1-Time spent playing | 3 | 4 | 4 | |
| 2-Number of strategies | 5 | 3 | 5 | |
| 3-Thought per turn | 5 | 1 | 4 | |
| 4-Experience needed to win | 5 | 2 | 5 | |
| 5-Expense | 2 | 2 | 2 | |
| 6-Amount to learn (to start) | 2 | 3 | 4 | |
| 7-Ease of learning (to start) | 2 | 2 | 4 | |
| 8-Sessions until competent | 5 | 2 | 5 | |
| 9-Number of supporting players | 2 | 5 | 1 | |
| 10-Range of the target audience | 3 | 3 | 2 |
The spider graph I’ve drawn below shows these three ratings overlaying each other.
You can see that my graph is closer to chess than monopoly, though I have more and harder lessons to learn than either of the games. On the other hand, I see myself as having narrower appeal and my “game” involves only one player: me. Here “fewer for the game” means fewer at the table, while fewer for life means fewer than the many people I could be involved with.
If I’m honest with myself, then this is probably the game I’m meant to play. And if I don’t like the way the game is playing, I’ll need to change more than just one parameter. Our lives are whole designs. Changing the results involves more than a change in strategy, it involves a change in the game’s design.
Enter your values in the table above and then plot yourself on the spider graph. What sort of game are you playing? If you set the rules, how would you change them?
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Caravan Sandwitch, is a single player, open-world, adventure game rated Everyone 10+, that runs on the PC, on Steam, Playstation 5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch 1 and 2.
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