There’s a concept that I’ve been playing around with for a while called the ‘Forever Game’. Not the greatest name*, but the broad idea is that a Forever Game is something that takes up part of your time regularly for the foreseeable future. I think everyone at one point has had at least one ‘Forever Game’ or something equivalent depending on their stage in life, passions, or genre preferences - a game that they know they can and will keep on going back to whenever they feel like playing a game.
What a Forever Game is, especially, is yours. If you are of a certain age you will have extended deliberately limited experiences and transformed them with your friends, maybe if you had a couple of hours you’d boot up Starfox 64 again to play through the fastest route, or you’d give yourself a challenge to play a single type team in Gold and Silver and excitedly tell people on the playground about your progress. You curated these Forever Games for yourself and you willingly and joyfully let them take a near-permanent space in your life.
Games are these fascinating things because there really is no fixed ‘end’ for them. You interact with them in a way that is more dynamic than, say, with a book. I never like acknowledging that the player has any power (that’s what games are for!) but there really is no greater exertion of agency than making the choice to repeat a process in a slightly different way. There’s nothing the game can do but be forced to accommodate you for as long as you wish, even if you are forty hours deep into an eight hour game. That’s what I mean by no fixed end - there’s no way for a game to stop you, say, repeating the same level or the same jump or the same action until you are personally satisfied with it. To do that with listening to a bar of a song or reading a chapter of a book is to fight the medium and the intent behind it, to limit your experience as an audience by overstepping; to do that with a game is to explore the limits of the deliberately constructed interactive boundary.
You can, if you choose, take this to extremes that warp and distort the intended experience completely. In Pokemon the popular challenge run is the Nuzlocke, Resident Evil has trophies now for various player-driven challenges such as “x number of steps”, “No saves”, “Never acknowledge the merchant’s existence”, all of these are wonderful little self-contained ecosystems of player expression and community love so strong it fundamentally changes the way that millions interact with the game. I think this is kinda beautiful - the ability for the player to choose to play the game in a way that fundamentally shifts what the game is. Speedruns are a great example of this artistic transformation on a large scale; if you’ve been paying attention to games (and charity) for the last decade plus you will have witnessed Mario 64 change from a leisurely platformer to a high performance sport where the weight of twenty five years of repetition has created a version of the game that is expected to be finished in under ten minutes. Then finished again. And again.
The sharing of enthusiasm and love for a thing and the desire to continue to play it transforms your experience of it and can transform the experience for others; it doesn’t require a hypothetical suitable game but instead the endless poking, prodding, treasure hunting, and strategising of imaginative play - something that I should point out is significantly easier to do while being part of a community.
I think that’s really the key to why I find the Forever Game so appealing - they show we naturally and individually create imaginative play spaces within play spaces.
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| Not the reason I started writing this, but I found my old copy of Pokemon Gold lmao. Shroomish is here to deter the weird used game market, don't worry about him. |
There’s no real way to manipulate a static experience, only re-interpret it. As an interactive experience, a video game has just enough room for you to do both, and I think our deeply personal libraries of Forever Games shows how incredible and unique that interaction can be.
If you are into fighting games you will find people with whole libraries of Forever Games, stretching out into the increasingly obscure distance until you start to wonder if they ever play anything else at all. Speedrunning communities are filled with people who would have initially found the hobby by simply playing their Forever Games to the point of boredom or (depending on the medium) to actual physical destruction, introduced to like-minded people who love to just play these specific games in increasingly specific ways.
You only have a certain amount of Forever Games in your life, and as you gain more responsibilities that number will naturally reduce. I used to play through the old Dawn of War: Dark Crusade campaigns on multiple difficulties with multiple factions, I don’t anymore because I am older and have to “work” and “feed myself”; my capacity for sinking time into a mostly unchanging experience has been diminished, as has my capacity to change that experience. As I age the joy in re-exploring and putting time, energy, and effort into imaginative play inside these spaces has lessened, and I think the beauty of the ‘game’ and the promise of endless entertainment has significantly lost its luster now that I’m a bitter older weirdo.
But even then I’ve found an exception - fighting games! Fighting games are an incredibly diverse genre but the foundations are always the same: mind games, character placement, spacing, knowledge, timing etc. etc. etc. and each individual game will have its own tribe of sickos desperate to convert you to Sailor Moon S or Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game and it rules. To me fighting games represent the purest form of imaginative play - upon entering the game to compete against another person you are forced straight into that headspace play as you respond and adapt to what is directly in front of you using both fundamental genre ideas and hyper-game-specific arcane bullshit.
I'm dead serious: check out this fucking game it rocks so hard. If you see the term 'kusoge' used while researching this, remember: kusoge is the Japanese word for a 'wicked dope mondo cool videogame'.
There really is (FORESHADOWING) no good way to replicate this feeling and no good parallel anywhere else in the wide world of media. For me to have found a genre that generates that meditative, engaged feeling that used to come from hours of repeating the same story or the same grind feels like a magic trick - like I’ve found the cheat code to enjoying what I play while still improving core aspects of comprehension and physical skill.
This cannot apply to everyone, of course. Fighting games are hell to some people, games where a loss state is an actual loss can cause people stress that locks them out of imaginative play and makes them miserable. The same repetition that brings me happiness cannot be so simply parlayed to the experience of someone else; similarly I cannot engage in the joy of a yearly playthrough of FFX - that isn’t fun to me, I can’t see where that would activate or stimulate the parts of my brain that buzz when I’m Fully Gaming, and I don’t understand how it works. What I can do is wave at them cheerfully from my repetitive fighting game archipelago and permit myself a tiny sense of awe at how varied and incomprehensibly layered our interactions with these funny little pieces of entertainment media are, and how incredible it is that we can stretch out our simple, repetitive actions inside simple, repetitive structures to such an overwhelmingly creative extent.
No matter our age we take our silly toys with us as long as we can until they stop bringing us joy, and the act of pushing that enjoyment, that refusal to put one toy down permanently because we know we can come back and find a sense of home inside of it, is, to me, a beautiful tribute to the games we have played and will play. It’s a comfort to me to look at Dark Crusade, knowing that I will never feel the same feelings or enjoyment that I had for it when it was my Forever Game, because it reminds of the capacity that I have to immerse myself in a world and transform it via play into one filled with my own little stories and my own little hopes.
What a pure and lovely note to end on, I’m so glad this blog won’t have a second part! (FORESHADOWING)
* The caveat is that the name Forever Game is like... not totally accurate on it's face. If I come up with a better name I'll go back and edit it in and pretend that I was using it this whole time.
