Imaginary Videogames
Created: 2023-04-09 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-01 (11:41:29)Status: completed
A recurring dream sees me walking into a preowned games store and discovering a cache of things I had never known existed. The store is almost invariably structured as follows. One main room accessed from the street by a glass, swinging door, and filled with rows of racks and shelves lining the walls. Then, at the back of the store, a smaller room, similarly lined with shelves and filled with racks, but also, in several locked glass cabinets, cartridges and controllers and obsolete systems for playing them.
In my dreams, scanning through these cabinets, I find something I had never even heard of before, that I should have known about: an obscure sequel to a bestseller, a spinoff, or something completely unknown but with at least an interesting cover. Of course, the dream ends long before I have the chance to play any of these games; the focal point does not seem to be in playing them, but in discovering they exist, and in imagining the worlds they contain.
I found copies of so many games exactly like this in the real-life version of this store, growing up. Things that embedded themselves unexpectedly into my world. Just as many lemons. Games are often more interesting as an imaginary thing than as something to actually play. When you look at screenshots and read walkthroughs and synopses, the thing you piece together in your mind may be richer and more interesting than what you end up playing.
For example, I knew about Earthbound for years before ever actually playing it. It was doubly inaccessible for me, being that it was never released in Australia and further in that it was only available for the Super Nintendo, a system our family never owned and which as such is where all imaginary and impossible games exist still for me. But following some initial lead first led me to screenshots, then to a walkthrough, which focused mainly on mechanics but then provided just enough information for me to reconstruct my own version of this game. Screenshots of bluefaced enemies and maps that reminded me of my own hometown. Descriptions of some evil influence originating from a faroff source. I imagined a sprawling opus that would somehow only grow in its scale and thematic scope the further inward you progressed.
It had not occured to me to simply emulate the game. But finally playing it years later, for all its merits, confirmed that yes it was ultimately like the other games of that era, that however anomalous its story and themes were, you could still place it in a genealogy with other roleplaying games of the time, that it still had randomised turn-based combat and characters who could only say so much, and the same inherent boundaries as anything else that had to be fitted onto a four megabyte cartridge.
Videogames depend on their players to hold two conflicting notions in mind. On the one hand, they need to articulate rules of play in such a way that their players can learn them and so access and interact with the game world. But they also need to suggest that their game worlds in some way exceed the boundaries of these rules of play, that like the realworld they are more expansive and unpredictable than they really are. At the point that their players have fully grasped their mechanics, learned everything there is to learn, they realise that it is ultimately a machine, cascading chains of code, a poor diorama.
Sometimes it’s more fun to imagine games without ever actually playing them.
Endmatter
Tags: @completed @games @virtual-spaces
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