The Effort Of Gaming

Gaming offers everything present in other art forms, from aesthetics to music to storytelling depths to philosophical exploration and more.  The superior factors are the combining of what other mediums can only do in part (music, for example, lacks any visual component on its own and is the most vague of all art forms), the potential for many more hours of use during first-time completion than other mediums allow for, and the unique element of controllability, which reflects the capacity for choice in moment by moment life.  Still, what is the appeal for the people willing to invest dozens (or hundreds) of hours into a virtual experience, and more specifically, why are they usually able to enjoy activities in virtual worlds that they would despise in their own lives?  I have never heard of anyone who said they enjoy pulling weeds out of the physical ground, though such a thing is logically possible.  In Animal Crossing, though, pulling weeds and paying mortgages can be enjoyable or "addictive" for people who likely dread these things otherwise.

It cannot be a lack of effort involved in the digital version of these actions even if someone believes this is not the case, as gaming does indeed require effort, and perhaps an extraordinary amount.  The only entertainment/artistic medium to require input from the user, and sometimes constant, precise input that can demand great skill with puzzles or combat at that, gaming is by default not a passive experience.  To analyze any art, one must actively think (and to know logical truths about the matter, one must avoid assumptions and discover what does and does not logically follow), a form of mental effort.  Analysis, much less rationalistic analysis, is not necessary for a person to merely experience or enjoy art, yet gaming demands control from the player regardless.  Some games will need almost non-stop interaction and some will have periods of lesser controllability (like with cutscenes), but to be a video game, electronic art must have this interactivity.  Lack of effort cannot possibly be what makes gaming appealing since playing a game can never entail its utter absence, though its ordeals are not the same as actually running great distances with one's own legs or collecting hundreds of the same item with one's own hands.

The person who pulls weeds in Animal Crossing still probably does not enjoy the same activity when it is physically carried out in their backyard.  The person who eagerly spends hours searching an open world far and wide in Metroid Prime or Dying Light to obtain items might loathe actually traversing the equivalent of such distances in "real life."  Yet, there is no such thing as a total lack of effort that makes doing the same things in a digital environment more pleasant or even deeply enjoyable.  It by necessity cannot be the case that gaming does not require effort, not just because of player input and the elaborate nature of some of the in-game pursuits, but also because of more situational functionality like the Wii's.  Literal motion control, which imposes an additional level of effort over ordinary gaming, was the major aspect of the system (and one that survived to the Switch for select titles).  A person could as much as sweat from this incorporation of physicality or from immersive concentration just as they could if carrying out some task in their daily or professional lives.

With or without gimmicks like motion controls, gaming features labor of some kind.  Physical labor in other contexts, however, is something many people are not interested in except out of sheer practical necessity, a distraction from some greater problem, or the desire for compensation.  The effort of gaming is, on the contrary, something many people, the same people, might seek intentionally out of a desire for pleasure and admiration.  The difference is that one kind of effort is related to survival or a rather ongoing struggle for comfort and can be burdensome, mundane, and exhausting, going so far as to induce hopelessness under the right circumstances.  The other is, though it has the greatest capacity for rational and introspective stimulation out of all art when executed correctly, a more leisurely kind of effort.  Both are labor of their own sorts.  That of gaming just gives people the chance to exert effort without using as much as standard physical labor would.  It is the combination of requiring labor of mental attention and physical input from the player without approaching the potentially negative characteristics of other effort that sets gaming apart here.