My wife Sanja isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, a gamer. At most she’s one of those dirty casuals – she’ll play Animal Crossing, and once had a brief obsession with Pokémon (which she had to go cold turkey on, because it became all-consuming). Growing up in Australia, there was a NES in their house – and she remembers playing Duck Tales – but for the most part she has no familiarity with any of the games I was raised on.
As a sort of experiment, I’ve recently been introducing her to some of those games I grew up with. We’re not playing two-player as such, but playing singleplayer games together – The Hobbit, Rock Star Ate My Hamster and others. It’s fascinating for me to watch her discovering them for the first time, warts and all (for the record, The Hobbit she found profoundly frustrating, but she got way, way into Rock Star…).
I’ve written before about how maddening I can find my formative games when I go back to them now. However, on this recent run of playthroughs, I realised something I haven’t noticed before; that there is a game within all those old games. A sort of meta-game, a battle of minds almost. I thought I was showing Sanja some ancient singleplayer games, but as I did it was clear there was always somebody else in the room – the ghost of someone from decades past – playing their own game with us.
It’s different now, with games being created by huge teams, to tick boxes that’ll satisfy the accountants. With old games being authored by one or two people, they were essentially a war between the player and the creator.
In The Hobbit, for example, it’s less about trying to follow the story of the book it’s based upon than it is about trying to get inside the head of creator Veronika Megler. It’s so authored – and not by JRR Tolkien –
