Sean Cheney

3/8/2020

One of the topics that we talked about this week in class (Primarily on Tuedsay) is that of platform, through the lens of the How to Play Video Games chapter titled “Pele’s Soccer: Platform” by Ian Bogost. In this chapter, it talked about the Atari 2600 game “Pele’s Soccer,” which is described as being “a terrible game.” However, what makes it interesting is the following quote:

“Understanding something about the material constraints of the Atari suddenly makes Pele’s Soccer more comprehensible, not to mention intriguing. It’s not so much a terrible rendition of soccer, as it is a unique and curious implementation of soccer on a piece of equipment that wasn’t intended to make soccer possible in the first place (HTPVG 266).” This was the paragraph that intrigued me the most.

Pele’s Soccer is still a bad game (according to Bogost, at the very least) but it derives value in a different way. It derives value from the fact that it dared to attempt to translate a game as complex as soccer into a video game system that had 128 bytes of RAM and used purple squares to represent people. If you view it from that perspective then Pele’s Soccer can be considered, at the very least, a meaningful attempt at something greater.

I personally find it obnoxious when people try to make video games into something they’re not. Complaining about a sports video game for not being a sport seems very contrived. It is not a direct representation of that sport, nor is it intended to be. I see this as being in the same vein as complaining that Counter-Strike or Call of Duty doesn’t have realistic shooting. I fail to see what the point is. No, it doesn’t have realistic shooting, but it’s not supposed to and to suggest it should entirely misses the point. What makes these games fun in the first place is that they aren’t realistic. Nobody would want to play a shooter game where you sit in one spot waiting for 10 hours for a target to appear.

Another interesting concept that was brought up in class was the culture that exists surrounding different game platforms. Specifically in class we focused on PC Gaming and the elitist culture that has developed around it. I am primarily a PC Gamer and will tend to gravitate towards getting something (especially online games) on PC over consoles if there is a choice. Of course, for exclusive games I still have a PS4 and Nintendo Switch (and many older Nintendo consoles). However, if given the choice, PC is by far the preference.

The class got me to thinking about why that was. I ended up finding myself reaching three reasons. The first was because at a base level, it was where all of my friends were. Everyone was playing League of Legends and World of Warcraft when I was younger and I wasn’t able to play with them on my terrible laptop. This led to the purchase of my first PC. The second reason was that I genuinely found myself preferring PC play to console.

I myself have fallen into some of the traps of #PCMasterRace (I’ll even jokingly use the hashtag in attempts to make fun of friends). I think it’s completely fine to have a preference, and even to have the opinion that one thing is “objectively” superior to another. It’s even ok to make jokes (within your specific friends boundaries) about things along those lines. However, preference quickly devolves into superiority and elitism.