May 11, 2006

• Who’s The Boss?

  Being in medical school somewhat limits my free time. More importantly,
  the sheer amount of hours I need to study also limits the activites I
  can accomplish in said free time. If I only have two hours before I
  have to get work done, Am i going to spend 45 minutes of it driving to
  the city only to have 20 minutes to find an activity and do it before
  returning? No. I am going to sit at my computer and post, or perhaps
  play video games, or listen to music or watch cartoons. That is what
  makes the few days I do go out and do something crazy all the more
  special.

  This is not however, to discount the many hours I have happily enjoyed
  lounging about playing said games. In their own way, they can lead to
  just as much satisfaction as their
  real life counterparts. But why is that? This search led to some deep
  introspection, and ultimately, where all searches end, Google, which
  led me to this writer:

  Clive Thompson has this to say on the subject:

  “And the curious sense of satisfaction that comes from a boss battle.
  They’re among the most cherished trophies in gaming: Get a bunch of
  gamers together to talk about adventure games or action titles, and
  sure — everyone will praise the wonderful characters, the superb
  graphics, the intriguing narrative. But it’s the boss battles that
  leave scars on their souls. They wind up sounding like grizzled war
  veterans, reminiscing wild-eyed about facing The Flood in Halo, four-armed Goro in Mortal Kombat or even Bowser in Super Mario Bros. Bosses dominate the psychic landscape of games.

  It’s partly because a boss battle is the most mythopoeic part of
  gaming. An adventure game, after all, typically puts you on some dread
  quest in which the foes get bigger and nastier until you face one
  final, hellish climactic baddie. This is a pure apocalyptic narrative
  – the same story line that has obsessed the West for millennia, from
  the Bible to Das Kapital to the Epic of Gilgamesh. Boss battles make games seem cosmic.

  But personally, I think the allure is much more straightforward than
  that.

  Every game has to strike a careful balance: It has to be teasingly
  difficult, but not overly frustrating. But when the boss battle comes
  along, the game is supposed to become suddenly more difficult. That makes the balance all the harder to strike.

  “The really good bosses seem impossible at first — but they provide
  incremental clues to weaken them,” said Ian Bogost, a game-design
  theorist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, when I called him
  about the subject. “That’s where the sense of mastery comes from. A
  good boss has to kill you a few times first. It has to be arduous, physically and mentally.” 

  With an overly-fierce boss, nothing you’ve learned in the game seems
  to work — which makes you think, I slogged through weeks of this game
  only to be repaid with this?

  That’s the key: A good boss demands you to call upon every technique
  you’ve painstakingly learned over hours of play — each special jump
  and magic combos.

  It’s like bosses are the SATs of the game world: “It’s a
  culmination,” Byron notes. “It’s not asking you to suddenly learn new
  skills. It’s asking you to remember everything you’ve
  learned.” You’re aiming for that “aha” moment when, desperate for some
  way to topple the boss, you suddenly hit upon a clever new way to apply
  your powers — and the insurmountable becomes manageable.

  That’s one of the best feelings ever — and it’s also one we rarely
  get in everyday life. The enemies we face in our contemporary world are
  so much more ambiguous and internal, and half the time it’s ourselves.
  We try to find a meaningful job, to hack through a bad relationship, to
  blunder through the red tape of money and taxes. Even our modern
  literature of struggle has been blunted. The Greeks and Romans imagined
  their lives through metaphors of heroes facing down arcane monsters; we
  read The Corrections or Indecision or A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, tales of neurotics struggling just to get out of bed.

  Our enemies are nowhere, and everywhere. Targets of resistance melt
  away in all directions. Terrorists seem frightening only so long as
  they elude the authorities. Death creeps slowly in hospital wards. And
  so, perhaps, it’s a comfort to see our fears rear up in an
  honest-to-god monstrosity. Bring it on.”

  I really liked that article…I just hope that in my constant battle
  against disease, despair, and death, the skills I have accquired
  through this game called life will be enough to overcome each obstacle
  until I run out of quarters or electricity…

  -J

  Save A Josh Foundation
  Amazon wish list of Save A Josh Fund approved materials located here

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