Sarah Uzelac

Sam Anderson, critic at large for The Times Magazine, wrote this week’s cover story on stupid digital games. He has most recently written for the magazine on Haruki Murakami and on the theme park called Dickens World.

Some readers seemed irate that you described these games as “stupid.” Why did you choose that word?

My first move is always to blame the editors, and it was the editors who first used the term “stupid games” casually to describe the kind of games they wanted me to write about. And we all understood immediately what they were talking about. Games that were repetitive, self-contained abstract little systems that you disappear into and you don’t get anything from in the end. I knew it was a provocative term, but it also reflected my antagonistic relationship with these games. But I’m using “stupid” in a special sense because anyone who has played Tetris would tell you that it is a beautiful, brilliant system. Frank Lantz, one of the game designers I talked to, described it as a mathematical sculpture. So the term “stupid” was half descriptive and half revenge for how these games have eaten my time and enslaved me.

Many if not most people I know play some sort of stupid game. What’s the appeal?

Part of the amazing thing about any kind of game is the disjunction between the incredibly meaningful experience it creates inside of itself, on the micro level, and then on the macro level its complete lack of meaning. For people who don’t enjoy soccer, it’s just a bunch of guys running around on grass, kicking a ball and following some arbitrary rules, and it has no meaning or value whatsoever. But for those of us who love soccer it is one of the peaks of human drama and excitement and value. Games provide something that is not trivial. They provide boundaries within which meaning exists. Otherwise all you do in adult life is drift around solving these horrible little problems for no reason and getting tangled up in arbitrary bureaucracies. One way to solve that is with religion, which gives a narrative of what happens after what happens before, what your role is in it. Another way to solve that problem is to dive into a game where those feelings of malaise suddenly disappear because you have that thing you felt you lacked. You have clear objectives, you have clear ways to get to those objectives and clear signals coming back to you constantly about whether or not you are moving toward your objectives. Games, whether they are Angry Birds, or basketball or chess, provide that clarity. I have an almost religious reverence that the games I love, and even for stupid games once I’m inside them, playing them.

Still, when I see someone playing Angry Birds, I think, What is that person doing with her time?

When I was playing Drop7, Ralph Nader kept popping into my mind. I recently watched a documentary about him, “An Unreasonable Man,” and he has this line that has been his slogan for a long time about being a full-time citizen. He has no hobbies. That’s the job of people. To be a full-time citizen and make your world better. So watching someone play Angry Birds for three hours or watching myself do it, I’m thinking, This is the opposite of citizenship. It’s solipsism. I also thought about Adorno saying that poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. All right, if we aren’t allowed poetry after such an atrocity, what on earth are we doing playing Angry Birds? It’s the ultimate triviality. Political upheaval, global warming are going on, and we’re playing Angry Birds. It’s almost like a dystopian novel where people are hooked up to virtual reality pods that help them forget the real world.

It sounds like soma, the drug the citizens in “Brave New World” take to give them that floaty, dreamy feeling.

Right, and this problem goes far back if you think about Ulysses and the lotus eaters. Do you continue your quest or do you find yourself moored on the beach drugged up and happy in a way that will never challenge you? I’m following that thought spring and know I have a puritanical streak, so I sound a little aggressively against games. But on a personal level, I’m so drawn to games and in love with them.

There’s a contradiction between the idea that these games are a waste of time and the feeling that you get from playing them that it is a better form of time because all of these structures have been imposed, maybe tickling that religion-oriented part of our brain.

There’s a rationalist strain of thinking, from the Enlightenment on, that sees religion as a waste of time, as a fantasy to which we retreat because we’re scared of the reality of things. I have both that and the religious impulse. I read a book from the 1930s called “Homo Ludens” (“Playing Man”), by a Dutch theorist named Johan Huizinga. It was a seminal book for thinking about games because it analyzed them as religious structures. Games exist within the magic circle, whatever defines the borders, whether it’s a chessboard or the edges of your iPhone screen. That’s the altar, and play is the highest impulse of humankind, and that’s what all of our great institutions, like law, grow out of. So I do have a reverence for the power of games, as well as a deep suspicion.

But what about a more commercial game like FarmVille, where there is a currency pegged to our currency and it’s more like a simulacrum of our world, without magical borders, where the real world bleeds in?

I started thinking about the arms race of stupid games right now as sort of a meta-stupid game where all the stupid-game designers were playing against each other in order to harvest the most attentional units possible and monetize them most efficiently. And Zynga, which makes FarmVille, is clearly crushing in that battle. The way they’ve done it is by creating meta-meta stupid games where what you’re doing in the stupid game is the sort of entrepreneurial exercise that Zynga is doing in the real world. All you are doing in FishVille is investing a little in fish in order to reap a larger reward to buy more fish to reap a larger reward. A lot of gaming people would say these are not really games. But we are obviously moving in that direction. That’s what’s scary for an old person like me. The magic circle is sort of perforated now.