I don’t play games anymore. Well, I do occasionally play a few games: a solitaire game, a tower defense game, Civilization V. But I don’t play them often and I don’t bother keeping up with the latest, greatest games coming out.
This has led people to criticize my criticisms of the games industry. “How can you criticize games that you’ve never played?” they ask. It sounds very reasonable. Of course, I don’t actually criticize specific games. I criticize the games industry for its lack of creativity. But that leaves me open to the criticism that I literally don’t know what I’m talking about. The criticism is incorrect, because I do occasionally read reviews or discussions of new games. Yes, that’s enough for me to draw conclusions. Here’s how.
This is the fossilized tooth of a creature known as a Megalodon. A paleontologist can look at this tooth and determine from its shape and structure that it came from a type of shark. The paleontologist can then deduce the size of the jaw required to hold this tooth, and from that the size of the digestive tract, the length of the body required to hold such a digestive tract, the size of the tail required to propel this creature at speeds sufficient to permit successful predation, the volume of the musculature required to drive that tail, and so on. The end result looks like this:
This, of course, is an imaginary situation; megalodons went extinct 15 million years ago. But a paleontologist can confidently extrapolate the entire creature from the single tooth. Here’s another example:
The brown areas of the skull are the actual fossils; the white areas are interpolations. The creature itself is shown on the right. All of this from a few fragments of fossil! How can paleontologists do this? They apply long-established rules of anatomy and physiology to interpolate the rest of the skull. There’s nothing magical about this; you do it all the time.
Oh my God, this poor fellow has only one eye and one ear; part of his shoulder and chest is missing and his barber did a terrible job with his haircut!
Well, no… you interpolate the missing parts because you already know what Abraham Lincoln looks like. Paleontologists do this on a much grander scale using much greater information about the anatomy of animals.
I started playing boardgames in 1966. I played scores of boardgames through the 1970s, then I started playing computer games. I have played hundreds of videogames in my life. I’ve seen a zillion ideas, variations, and architectures. So, when I read a review of the game, I can reconstruct the entire game in my head from the fragments I get in the review.