Is playing make believe a waste of time? Is there not an equally viable argument for using video games to learn about yourself? Arizona State University professor and author Matt Bell thinks there is.
His obsession of choice is "Baldur’s Gate II" — a video game that takes place in a Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy world. Baldur’s Gate and D&D are role playing games, also known as RPGs. In the analogue version of these games, players build their characters from scratch, based on a wide range of options that can be configured in almost limitless combinations. The actual game play becomes an act of collective imagination between the players — once everyone has decided who they are, another player creates a quest for the characters, and they have to make a constant stream of decisions about how their character might behave as the quest unfolds.
Bell spent more hours than he can count playing games like this as a kid, and as an adult, he still does. Bell says there was a time when he thought this time spent playing RPGs would prevent him from becoming a responsible adult. But, these days he’s an author and a professor, and he’s realized that he has games like Baldur’s Gate II to thank.
Full conversation
MATT BELL: You know, role playing games can be a place for trying on different versions of yourself or even -selves you would like never be. Your character has like a really minor, sort of, pre-given backstory. And then really, in some ways, you're inventing the backstory by making choices in the present, right?
Like, you know, like Dungeons & Dragons is a character class called a paladin, where you basically have to be like the most lawful, most good version of yourself and trying to play a character who always made the most noble decision. Or you could be a wizard who craves power more than anything else and sort of in every scenario, making a choice that, like, moved you closer to whatever you perceived power to be.
SAM DINGMAN: OK, but, but so what's really fascinating to me about this is you're talking about this phenomenon of, how the great fun of a game like Baldur's Gate 2, is that you are inventing kind of in real time, a backstory for this character to understand how they relate to the world and might behave in the present.
But, you also write that, “I believed that growing up meant divorcing yourself from who you were before,” and that that's a sensibility that you had not in a gaming sense, just like as a person moving through the world. What do you make of the fact that the game was teaching you, and tell me if you disagree with this, what life actually is, which is that you can't divorce yourself from who you were before?
BELL: I mean, I think you're right. I think, you know, in the book I talk about feeling like fantasy or science fiction or things were childish or something, and I was supposed to grow out of them, which I, I do not believe in any way now. As a fiction writer, when I started letting those influences from fantasy and science fiction and, and myths and fairy tales, and all these other things back into my writing, my writing kind of came alive. And when I was trying to write without the things I loved, it was like writing with my hands tied behind my back.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah, another quote from the book, you say, “I wonder what it's cost me to refuse so strongly what mattered so much.” Could you maybe give us an example of a moment in your life, as a writer, where you did decide to let those youthful influences in and where you felt like your capacity as a storyteller or as an artist came alive?
BELL: Yeah, I think one of the ways I would invent characters is just like on the first page, have the character do something I would never do. Like, if I'm timid about approaching strangers, just have like the character immediately like, approach a stranger and start talking to them in a way that I would not. And then you're like, “OK, this is a different person now, they're making choices I would not, what other things are different about them.”
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, so kind of at the other end of the spectrum though, you know, we've been talking about these various ways in which this far-fetched world of gaming actually has a lot of real world analogs and and serves as like pretty good prep for life as an adult, particularly life as an artist, like yourself. But, you also point out that there are some ways in which games like Baldur's Gate to function that are not particularly authentic to life in the real world.
In particular, this idea that the narrative in the game revolves entirely around your character. Like, there's entire regions of the map that don't exist until you discover them, and if you are on a quest to, say rescue somebody from a dungeon, it doesn't matter when you do it as long as you get to it eventually. Like, the idea that they might be suffering in the time that you take to get to them is sort of not acknowledged. How did you start to make sense of that piece of it as you got older?
BELL: I think in some ways when I was younger, I do think I thought the world revolved around me in lots of ways, right? And I do think, you know, we don't always ascribe the same complexity to other people that we give ourselves. Like, and I think it's actually kind of an act of will to remember that everyone is as complicated as you are and everybody else is going through their own 15 emotions every time they do something.
And I think that took me a long time to learn, which even though the game treats you as like the most important person in the world, I still think like playing with lots of different kinds of characters is a way of, of understanding the complexity of others, or, “what would it feel like to be this kind of person? What would it be like to make these kinds of decisions?”
DINGMAN: Oh, that's interesting. That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, that there is a way in which you can treat games like this as an opportunity to broaden your empathy and, you know, almost literally walk through the world in the shoes or or boots of a bunch of different kinds of of beings, but it's that you have to choose to do that.
In a similar vein, one of the other things that you bring up in the book that I really appreciated that I, I don't think it's talked about enough when it comes to this type of games specifically is violence. As you write, you say, “In Baldur's Gate 2, you are both the victim of great acts of violence and also violence's greatest perpetrator, killing your way across every realm you roam,” and I thought that was very fascinating because we, you know, we hear a lot about discourse in terms of violence in video games when it comes to fighting games like Mortal Kombat, where the whole point is like, you face off against one other person and you're just supposed to gore them until they're dead. But, this is different. This is, violence is a part of moving through the world just as much as forging political allegiances is or falling in love. How has it affected your relationship to violence, particularly as a writer?
BELL: I remember reading one time about the game, God of War, which I played and liked, you know, but really all you can do is jump and hit things, right? Like it's sort of, it's very violent, and I remember reading somewhere like to beat the game, you have to hit the attack button like 2 million times, right? 2 million times you have to choose to attack something. And like that idea sounds crazy, right? Like, that's like a weird choice to make over and over.
You know, I've played video games my whole life. I think there are some things that I'm not super interested in playing anymore, like I'm not a shooter person. I don't want to even do play gun violence, things like that. But, I do think about violence a lot in my work, and I write about it not because I like it, but because I'm scared of it, right? I was writing about a thing that bothers me in the world, and so I, I'm thinking about it a lot that way.
And I, I'm often trying to make it, like, unenjoyable in some way or so that it's not, it's not like pornographic violence is not something that's like, like exciting. It's a weird thing, I'm trying to write it well, but not in a way that it's fun, if that makes sense. And obviously in a video game, like you wouldn't design combat that wasn't fun. I think there is a tension between that. They call it, there's a name for it that's very fancy, ludonarrative dissonance, right? Where the dissonance between the game play and the story it's telling, becomes sort of noticeable by the, by the player.
DINGMAN: That's interesting. I love that term, ludonarrative dissonance. I'm writing that down. But it, speaking of, of dissonance, that realization that you're describing that there is this kind of inherent tension in the way that the narrative of a game like Baldur's Gate is put together that it has, the violence has to be fun or else you wouldn't play it. That seems like a very real and mature recognition on your part, and also like something that you maybe couldn't have arrived at without playing so many hours of Baldur's Gate.
