The Entertainment Software Association says that 72 percent of all households in the United States have at least one person who plays videogames on a console or a computer, but they don’t mention the popular cultural distinction that sets apart gamers from those who merely play games. It goes like this: A 22-year-old man playing Call of Duty on his Xbox until 5 a.m. is considered a hardcore gamer, but his 45-year-old mother, playing with her Wii Fit a few times a week, or his 17-year-old sister playing Rock Band with her friends on a Friday night, would probably not be entitled to the title.

Attempting to explain this definitional discrepancy, The Casual Games Association made the following observation:

“Think of Atari and games such as Pacman, Space Invaders, Frogger and Donkey Kong. Casual games have maintained the fun, simplicity, boundless creativity that characterizes arcade-style games. On the other hand, enthusiast games also termed core games, such as Grand Theft Auto, Doom and Mortal Kombat, have been developed using high-end technology that appeals more to younger audiences.”

It’s an appealing attempt at explaining the problem, but it is also incorrect. First of all, when Pacman et al came out in the 1980s, they were far from being considered causal by the people who spent their days in dark arcades, feeding quarter after quarter into the machine in an effort to beat their high score. Even more profoundly, however, this definition does not account for how these games can be played. Many people may play casual games casually, but they all do have the potential for intense, focused play. Strategy guides and video walkthroughs of Angry Birds, for example, are all over the internet. The kind of precision involved in mastering Wii Golf involves daily practice, training the fine muscles of the hand and wrist to swing precisely. There are expert modes on Rock Band that act less like karaoke and more like turning your throat into a controller, fighting desperately to stay a few notes away from death on the simplest of songs. On the other end of the hardcore divide, many “big” games are designed for casual play options. Call of Duty, for example, has 10-minute rounds of play, and many people who play Grand Theft Auto do it to go on killing sprees with a soundtrack but ignore the narrative altogether.

Instead, if we want to look at what makes a person-who-plays games from the gamers, it may be better to look again at how they are marketed. Back to the Casual Games Association:

“Casual games appeal to people of all ages, gender and nationalities[...] A majority of those who purchase casual games, however, are over 30 and female…”

Although they don’t state the reverse—that hardcore games are for under-30 males—this gendered perception of gamers is everywhere in evidence. Wikipedia’s entry, for example, feels the need to separate “Girl Gamers” (as well as LGBTQ gamers) out from the rest of the group, as if they are exceptions rather than the rule.

And that’s a damn shame. While industry statistics point at 42 percent of all gamers as women, and indicate that these women have been playing for an average of more than ten years, women who play games are still perceived as strange freaks. I’m one of them. I can’t remember life without video games in them: Centipede and Breakout on the Atari, Jumpman and Tapper on the Commodore 64; slumber parties with Track and Field, Dr. Mario and Vegas Dream on the NES; Puzzle Fighter and Tekken tournaments in college; a lifelong love affair with Tetris; even now party seems right anymore with some sort of Rock Band or Wii Party. But none of this history mattered much; my husband only started noticing my passion for gaming when I played Final Fantasy with a strategy guide to my left, a beer to my right, and a healthy disregard for timing passing me by. Only then did he start calling me a gamer. And the saddest thing is that because I’m not a young man, and because I’m not playing first person shooters with other young men, I never called myself that either, even though I’d been a gamer all my life. It’s time for that to change.

To answer this question, just look at the subgenre of computer simulation games devoted exactly to this pursuit, appropriately known as “Dating Sims.” These games, as one might imagine, intend to simulate some aspect of actual or imagined reality of interpersonal relations. And although these games can take a variety of forms, the objective remains fairly consistent: the player must select a partner to pursue romantically.

But just as real-life dating has considerable consequences, so do dating sim games have much to say about life’s biggest questions, such as fate, destiny, and agency.

I realized this early on in my experience, as I was putting the moves on Ariane from the game Virtually Date Ariane. The game starts with a generous dose of creepiness, with the player treated to a voyeuristic glimpse of Ariane in a tight low-cut shirt through a window. Approach Ariane, and she flirts with you. Move the cursor across her face or her breasts, and the option of complementing her becomes available. Move the cursor across her collar bone, and a hug is in the cards. I chose the polite path, and complimented my pixilated paramour. Ariane must have liked that: she led me on and gave me the green light for a kiss. After the kiss she wanted to talk, but the only options made available to me were physical advancements. Which means I could only be a one-track-minded chauvinist. Ariane didn’t like that. Equally as troubling, I couldn’t figure out how to “win;” alas, it seemed as if I was fated to “lose.”

Perhaps this game, like many others that I experimented with, is a commentary on the established trope that women are impossible to read. This same trope that depicts women as being emotionally fragile, with unintelligible triggers, and impossible to reason with. This is as false in games as it is in life; after all, why bother with the whole sim experience if every interaction is preordained?

In a sense, of course, every video game is preordained, with the course of the game already codified into systems of algorithms. And unlike life, the wooed generally have a skewed, or utterly non-existent, sense of history. I could play the same game, or even replay the same interaction, over and over without consequence. The person I’m attempting to court has no idea that I said the “wrong” thing to the same question twice already. Thank goodness: how could we ever win in this system without this amnesia, without characters with personalities that are profoundly vague, unobtainable, or even non-existent?

Some dating sims, however, do attempt to tempt players with big, virtual personalities. These games give players points to distribute amongst different skills and personality traits. Later in these games, my avatar could perform certain tasks to earn points that would add value to certain skill sets. I could improve my strength by 10 points if I ran on the beach. If only real life was so simple, with a visit to the gym rewarded by instantly visible and quantifiable results. That might keep me motivated.

Of course, the tendency to quantify relationships isn’t exclusive to computer games. Long before first player courted the first virtual character, women’s magazines offered quizzes with definite scores and corresponding categories. But their promise was false: The scores to the quizzes never did much to really elucidate to me if my crush actually liked me, or the extent of my sex appeal; all they did was reveal an arbitrary system of evaluation. Online dating sites do the exact same thing, asking their participants to categorize themselves in personality tests that are subject to data mining in order to find their ideal partner.

This type of approach works nicely in a game, but not so much in real life. “Do you floss?” was among the questions asked in a survey to generate a profile on okcupid.com that qualified me for some mates over others. My answer would influence the algorithm that would then help me choose my romantic partner and shape my destiny. In real life, none of my partners have ever asked me such trivial questions as a measure of assessing whether or not we were suitable.

What happens when we categorize and quantify ourselves for another person? Firstly, categorizations alone don’t reflect personal histories and context behind the behaviors or values at hand. This kind of categorization appears to also have a degree of finality about it. It seems to limit the role of mutual growth and adaptation between individuals, an important aspect of relationships. I am of the belief that we are not “made” for another person; instead, it’s a question of give and take.

Love is something often left to the fates. But in these games, it’s the jurisdiction of code. The player may have some opportunities to exert agency in these games in pursuit of a relationship, but only within the prescribed systems of algorithms and assumptions. This deterministic quanitfiability may offer the player some degree of comfort in externality. Dating becomes a low-stakes game. The player doesn’t have to suffer from what can be crippling anxieties surrounding forays into romance. One can play a scenario a number of times to explore one’s own successes, boundaries, and fantasies about different selves.

The game’s code may be loaded with an agenda and morals, but we also come “loaded” with similar dispositions and assumptions. So perhaps these games are not as foreign of an experience as we may presume. By playing a dating sim, we consider a perspective on relationships that may or may not be like our own. At points, I was struck by the profound commentaries of some of these games, be they intentional or not. My experience with Ariane taught me a thing or two about the “male mystic.” Another game, puura academy dating sim, challenges hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality (and speciesism!) through gameplay. And this may be the greater virtue of these games: like dating, it is about understanding the perspectives and predispositions of others. And that’s no small thing.

Samples of Dating Sims:

College Romance

Elf Girl Sim Date RPG

Idol Days Sim Date

puura academy dating sim

Virtually Date Ariane

Maybe I should explain a bit. This scene occurred on Turntable.fm, a website where people come to play music. On the site, users take turns playing songs for each other, and are awarded points if the listeners decide they like the song. Much like the AOL chat-rooms of yore, the site is organized into different rooms that cater to different communities. With 20,000 daily active users according to data-tracking website AppData, as well as a variety of celebrity investors and partnerships (including Kanye West, indie darlings Passion Pit, and noted electronic music producer Diplo), Turntable has successfully turned music sharing into a computer game.

Full disclosure: I am one of those daily active users, and ardent proponent of the site. I first came to Turntable when it was still in private beta, in July 2011, and it was a totally new kind of experience for me. I had never been the kind to play video games as a hobby. Video and computer games always seemed very complicated, very solitary, and, honestly, very pointless to me.
Instead, I found my passion in music, which I would listen to and share with the same fervor as the most committed gamer.

When you think about it, however, are playing music and playing games really so different? It could be argued that music sharing has always been a game among friends. Anyone who’s been to a concert can attest to the sense of play they feel among the crowd while the band is performing. So can anyone who has ever sat in a basement listening to a record with a group of like-minded fans, or shared headphones with someone so you could show them a new song. Dutch thinker Johan Huizinga termed this feeling the “magic circle,” moments that are “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.” The magic circle is a sense of community that is an essential component of any game – it’s what sets the game apart from “real life.”

Turntable has found a unique way to combine these magic circles by creating an environment where music sharing is imbued with game aspects, turning an activity that has always been playful into a proper game. The first step towards this was making it possible for everyone to listen to the same music at the same time. Whereas previously, technological constraints made sharing music with other people something that could only be done via file transfer, Turntable users can create playlists, either by searching Turntable’s extensive catalog or by uploading their own tracks, and then take turns “DJing” one song at a time. The rest of the users in that room listen together, and can give instant feedback via “Awesome” or “Lame” buttons at the bottom of the screen. Your musical taste is immediately validated or rejected, which in either case encourages continued play. If your song was liked, you feel like continuing your streak and garnering more praise; if it wasn’t, you feel challenged to find something that the crowd will like.

With that validation come points, a common traditional game aspect. For every “Awesome” vote a song you play gets, you are awarded a point. As your score increases, you get access to more avatars, meaning more options for how your character appears in the site’s rooms. That’s it – no badges, no hidden levels (or songs), no trophies or achievements or accolades. What you do get is a very basic sense of how “good” your music taste is, and watching those points add up (and feeling your ego about your music taste grow) can be addicting. In fact, the point system may have been what first got me hooked. Not only was my music taste being arbitrated instantly, but I watched that peer approval slowly add up. For my first few weeks on the site, all I thought about was how to play the kind of song that would get as many people as possible to press the “Awesome” button and boost my score.

This may seem like it’s not much of a pay-off. Today’s players are used to highly customizable avatars and environments, or hidden levels they can play once they reach certain goals, or at the very least trophies or badges for the most banal of accomplishments. However, for Turntable, simplicity is key. By keeping the point system simple, and the rewards for those points basic, Turntable allows the music-sharing aspect of the site to dominate while points slowly accumulate in the background. This means the focus of the site is less on the quantity of points you’ve earned and more on the quality of the time you’ve spent earning them. At the same time as I was earning these points, I was becoming a regular in certain rooms on the site. I got to know the other regulars, and started looking forward to hopping into the room each morning to chat with them as much as listen to the music. The more time I spent on the site, the less I worried about the points themselves and the more I worried about what the points represented – that my new friends liked the music I was playing, and by extension, that they liked me.

That is the beauty of Turntable, and of most successful group games and music-sharing enterprises – the communities they build. The technological advances that have made instantaneous group listening possible set the stage for effective music-sharing sites, and the gamification of the experience provided a powerful hook. So while the traditional game aspects of sites like Turntable may be essential to their early success, at the end of the day, it’s the magic circle, that sense of community, that keeps users coming back. That’s why, for Benny, breaking the 10,000-point mark felt like accomplishing “everything and nothing.” It wasn’t the points Benny was aiming for – that’s the nothing part. It’s the fact that his friends were so excited to get him there, and that meant everything.

Despite our affiliation, we’re not an academic journal. Rather, we believe that with the ascent of video games to the fore of popular culture, there’s room for a thoughtful, argumentative, and irreverent publication devoted to parsing all corners of this expanding field, from considering particular games to thinking about the medium’s social, political, and economic implications.

We were moved to start this publication by the blunt realization that nothing like it exists. With very few exceptions, anyone currently curious about gaming can turn to one of three avenues. The first is game blogs, where games are often treated like cars, taken apart and subjected to a thorough mechanical examination that is comprehensible to few outside a small community of enthusiasts. While these outlets have their value, we think it necessary to find a new language to discuss games, one that leaves the minute machinations behind and seeks instead to capture the passion and the wonder that make us all spend so many of our hours with a controller at hand.

The second form of writing about games we reject is that sporadically available in the press. Despite maturing both as an industry and as a medium, video games still seem to evoke some unfortunate concoction of dismissal, derision, and alarm in many of the journalists who cover them. While questions of violence or addiction—largely settled by scholars long ago—continue to haunt the conversation about games, little or no attention is paid to both the cataclysmic shifts and the tiny tremors that are each day reshaping video game technology, design, marketing, and community. We hope to fill this gap by providing reviews, interviews, essays, and reports that would be of interest to both those familiar with video games and those curious to learn more about them.

Finally, while we are indebted to the many fine thinkers—in academia and beyond—whose work continues to challenge and inspire us, we believe that we are still far removed from a thorough understanding of video games, the ways in which they differ from other media, and the relationships, not always obvious, they foster with their players.

These are big questions, and they mustn’t be addressed by scholars alone. With time, we hope to turn this publication into a platform in which academics and designers, artists and policy makers, bloggers and gamers and other interested parties could discuss the topics that occupy us all, and together inch towards a better understanding of what may already be called, with little or no exaggeration, the predominant medium of our generation.

We hope you enjoy this inaugural issue. We’ll be updating the magazine regularly, and urge you to visit us again soon as well as sign up for our mailing list for ongoing updates.  In the meantime, game on!