Photograph by Jodi Miller

I must be one insufferable little prick. As I navigate the Inception-like hallways of Halo: Reach’s Reflection map, a grin spreads slyly across my face. I’m armed only with a DMR, a score of 49 to 49, and a genuine lust for Blue Team blood. “Hallway’s clear,” signals my friend in a fuzz of chatter. It wasn’t. A blue figure jumps around the corner. My heart hesitates, but my finger doesn’t. The shot stays true.

“Competition has one goal: Determine a winner at the end,” writes Brian Campbell for The Escapist. Campbell’s theory about competition and play asserts that intense competition means “the feel of the game becomes far more serious…and less fun.”

But is play really divorced from competition?

Do they live separately, engaging in a failing long-distance relationship where Play decides there’s too much living to do to stay tied down to sweaty-sounding nouns? In a word: No. It’s an argument based on a term-confusion problem that runs rampant in videogame journalism.

Ask five people what videogames are and you might get five different answers: videogames are art; videogames are entertainment; videogames are interactive; videogames are social; videogames are a new form of storytelling. Those five people might not agree on each other’s definitions of videogames, but they may find common ground on the fact videogames are about playing. So let’s avoid the leviathan of subjectivity that videogames are and focus on what play is – an activity of enjoyment. In other words, play is fun. Wow, so videogames are fun; didn’t need a quantum physicist to figure that one out. But instead of asking what fun is, let’s try instead looking at how fun is achieved.

In a phrase that would make Dr. Seuss blush, fun is won.

So when you look at fun as a goal to be achieved, you’re faced with a competition of some sort. You cannot win anything without competing against something. And since videogames are about playing, and playing is about winning, then videogames are about competing. What you win, however, comes from a staggering number of possibilities, such as fellowship, enjoyment, or championship within the game’s rules. Each of these goals are accomplished through competition. You see now how quickly subjectivity become a thorn in the collective urethra of games writing?

Mistaking cooperation for mercy, Campbell theorizes, “Valuing play over competition sometimes means letting someone take back a bad move or recover from bad luck.” Putting forth his own encounter with “cooperative competition,” Campbell recalls a Magic: The Gathering game with a female friend where he didn’t “press the advantage” because “where’s the fun in an ending you already know?” This style of play, he argues, brought out the best in each of them.

Playing, Campbell suggests, should be about “how we play without always letting it be why [we play].” But isn’t how we play determined by why we play? When we play for a reason it affects how we go about playing. People play videogames to win adoration; to win fellowship; to win within the game’s rules; etc. So, if playing to win within the rules of the game, how we play becomes more aggressive. If playing to win, say, the enjoyment of company, how we play becomes less aggressive, but only in the traditional sense. Why we play leads into how we play, and becomes the basis for playing. Where Campbell’s subjectivity hits its stride is his assertion that people playing to win the game take the fun away for everyone else. Can’t the same be said about people playing for simple amusement?

Let me explain: In 2010 I played Halo: Reach team deathmatch religiously with one of my good friends. Much of our time playing Halo and other first-person shooters involved the “prepare to die” mentality Campbell describes. For the most part, win or lose, I had a blast playing, because the teams my friend and I competed with were also embroiled in a “Die! Die! Die!” style of play. It’s exhilarating — at least to me — to face someone more skilled than I (Darwinian Difficulty, anyone?). I’d go so far as to say it’s fun for me. What isn’t fun, however, is when some jackass takes that competitive spirit of the match and shits all over it by playing for simple kicks.  I like a good knock-out and tea-bag as much as the next Spartan, but if you do it to your own teammate again and keep costing us points I’m gonna write an article about you in a few years.

“If the motive is more important than the play itself, it’s not play,” said Dr. Stuart Brown in 2008. Campbell puts forth a similar argument: “Are we allowing the competitive ‘spirit’ behind our play to become the competitive ‘phantom’ that overshadows it?” What Campbell failed to take into account, however, was the concept of flow, which Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi defined as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake.” When in a flow state, however, the motive to win isn’t the motive for play, but a by-product of it.

A world without competition is a world without play. WhatCampbell suggests cannot be about toning down the competitive nature of gaming, but rather a matter of common courtesy, of human decency. Because our interests do not, and will not align 100 percent of the time, we should all just accept that eventually someone is gonna sneak up behind us and fuck us right in the fun.

Meet Martin “Marty” Michael Hall, a ordinary high school kid with a remarkable ability to turn the mundane into magic. Marty’s story begins much in the same way many of our own teenage fantasies start — in our dreams. As Marty falls asleep, his dream is shaped by a TV show featuring the villain Commander Hood. Marty’s mind intercepts the stimulation from the show, casting him the protagonist in battle with Commander Hood: kidnapper of Samantha – the girl literally of Marty’s dreams – and proponent of shotgun-styled weddings. After getting his ass kicked, a witty wizard sporting an ultra hip demeanor bestows Marty with an “ancient artifact” that can take down Commander Hood – a ’80s styled Trapper Keeper.

Saturday Morning RPG’s emphasis on the old-school Trapper Keeper as Marty’s – and therefore the player’s – source of power mimics the mobile industry’s values in spite of the AAA console market. The Trapper Keeper represents tradition, a return to form, as power. The use of pixel animation makes SMRPG traditionalist. If you want, think neo-noir, only as Tom Auxier pointed out, the lines of influence are clearer for us videogame folk to see than for audiences to see in a movie like Brick, for example. And as Christopher Nolan, a traditionalist in his own right has proven through use of film over digital, utilizing an outdated form can be an effective tool toward innovation and creativity if done well and without a total neglect of modern benefits.

Marty’s magic notebook is fashioned with customizable Scratch-N-Sniff stickers that yield additional benefits to speed, defense, attack and magic depending on how fast you can flick a finger back and forth on the screen. With just one finger, SMRPG finds that elusive, almost mythical, JRPG clitoris. One that hasn’t been stimulated in years, mind you. Tap the screen to select the Indiana Jones inspired satchel containing floppy discs, basketballs, joysticks, Transformers look-a likes and Michael Jackson’s rhinestone glove. Tap the screen again to target an enemy and once more to hit at the exact moment for maximum damage. The same goes for defense. Simple and effective, yes; but more importantly it is inclusive. I feel connected to the action and consequently become a participant whose mental and physical reactions mean the difference between game start and game over, and more importantly between Marty and Samantha.

The episodic nature of cartoons allows the season to be digested slowly and thoughtfully. Using the benefits of iOS and the App Store, Mighty Rabbit plans to release SMRPG as a season, with several episodes scheduled throughout the year. These episodes can be played in any order, with stats and inventory carrying over between each as you play. Releasing the game in episodes fosters a situation where gamers feel compelled to play at a much slower and methodical pace, rather than racing through the game and bragging about their speed online.

Blame it on the platform limitations, or on the title’s humble funding through Kickstarter, but SMRPG isn’t interested in dazzling audiences with visual spectacle. Instead the aesthetic choices affect the narrative. For instance, the pixilated NES style smashed against stylistic polygonal backdrop sets the stage for nostalgia (while still appearing flattering on the iPhone’s retina display), taking us back to a simpler time before cable television stole cartoons from Saturday and redistributed them across the week like a Robin Hood of animation. The pastels breathe life into the tongue-in-cheek characters of SMRPG, like the school faculty who insist they “are not soldiers” and will “totally kill you” for not flushing your toots. Several characters resemble actual Saturday morning cartoons and 80s pop culture icons, such as the Transformers, Michael Jackson and The Karate Kid, but with subtle differences to avoid copyright issues.

The retro movement has been criticized as anti-progressive, faux-innovative and nostalgic for no other reason than being nostalgic. SMRPG should serve as an example that derails this thought train to expensive roadside waste, as every bit of its nostalgia and retro design serve a purpose to create an experience grounded in tradition while still taking advantage of the technologies mobile gaming has to offer. Perhaps its most notable difference is in the soundtrack, where audio mixing can be tricky on mobile devices because of limited asset space. Think of it like this, a music album is about 3MB per track, while the limit of apps for over-the-air download is 20MB – hardly any room at all for a soundtrack to breath and impress. Perhaps this is the reason why many retro games imitate lo-fi NES soundtracks, but SMRPG is different. It succeeds on a musical level by enlisting the ’80 certified talents of Vince DiCola (Rocky IV, Transformers: The Animated Movie) and Kenny Meriedeth (Duck Tales, Power Rangers). The result is a tangy re-imagination not possible by retro-imitation. Wearing the standard Apple earphones, I found the lows thundering, the mids clear and the highs crispy. There is an undeniably retro feel in the soundtrack, but aside from one Transformers: The Animated Movie reject, it’s all modern stuff played by guys who helped shape your animated adventures in the ‘80s.

It’s not all good in the hood, though, as the controls suffer the same fate of most mobile games. Touching anywhere on the screen produces a virtual analog stick that follows your finger. Sounds easy enough, but the lack of multi-touch to hold two points at once makes for some clunky maneuvers as your finger eventually slides too far to the side of the phone. What’s more, for a game as intuitive as SMRPG there’s an unnecessary and annoying amount of tutorial. In a title where exploration is encouraged, it feels as if you’re not so much in the wild as you are in a city park with your parents. The most authentic aspect of the controls — at least for the dudes — is the ability to play with one hand while the other rests cozily inside your pajama bottoms like your mom used to scold you for while watching cartoons.

Saturday Morning RPG is traditionalist retro gaming done right. Rather than retro for retro’s sake, SMRPG is a videogame for videogames’s sake. That is, SMRPG uses a traditional lens to frame a modern take on a stale genre without screwing with the underlying principles gamers love about JRPGs.

Note: This article originally appeared on Nightmare Mode

“What is this generation’s Pac-Man?” It’s a question posed to my associate and I during a late night smoking cigarettes outside of the Washington Hilton, asked by a short, sunglasses-clad African-American in his late twenties. I previously told him I was a game journalist here to cover GameFest, to which he asked what games I review. “I don’t really review games,” I responded. “I’m more of a critic of the culture as a whole. In fact, I don’t even have much time to play that many games anymore.” He seemed somewhat mystified, wondering what a game journalist who doesn’t review or play games was doing masquerading as one. But then again, we were in a city filled with phonies and liars – sometimes it’s good to blend in. But his bewilderment was satisfied when he asked that significant question – the question that made my job title and reason in DC that much more apparent. One of us answered Grand Theft Auto, the other Angry Birds – two very different answers with very different reasoning. This led to a discussion of whether Pac-Man meant “icon” or mass appeal. In the 80s, anyone strolling through the mall or a pizza shop could slip a few quarters in the machine and play Pac-Man for as little or long as they liked. Today, our smartphones are our malls – we browse, try and purchase apps that augment our lives. Angry Birds matches Pac-Man in this sense, and in the sense of an overtly popular product enjoyed across the gamut from young to old. As an icon, however, Angry Birds doesn’t resonate so much as Pac-Man did, and still continues to do. The answer wound down to Mario, Sonic and other iconic game characters, but that begged another question: what was meant by “this generation?” If it were the social generation, then Angry Birds definitely seems the apt comparison. But if it were the generation that the three of us grew up in, then what the hell was our Pac-Man? Did it even matter? Or were we all too drunk by this point to even know what we were talking about? And for that matter, who was this strange guy? This guy who couldn’t even remember the title or main character of Metal Gear Solid: how could he pose such a sapient question? I looked forward to GameFest and the Smithsonian’s Art of Video Games even more now, if for nothing other than enlightenment.

Our paranoia set in further as we stumbled through the hotel to breakfast. Unsure of our status as complimentary guests, we tried our key in the elevator to access the 10th floor breakfast level to no avail. After a few tries we were on our way, but only because another Hiltonite had called the elevator. We were in, but now came the hard part – trying to keep it together long enough to blend in with this elitist crowd. I managed well enough, but my friend had no such luck. The croissant he picked up with the tongs fell off his palm-sized plate and bounced, circling toward the middle of the floor. The pack stared violently at my associate, then to the croissant and back again to him, as if to say “what are you going to do now?” It was a test to see if he were one of them. Perhaps he should’ve picked up the croissant, excused himself, and disposed of it. Perhaps he should’ve pretended he didn’t notice at all. But he turned to meet the pack’s judging stares, spun back around, set the tongs down on the table, grabbed a new croissant with his bare hands and walked away. They were on to us — we didn’t belong here with these privileged breakfast folk who were most likely among the highest ranks in their respective professions. We may have passed their test had we been legitimate artsy people, but we were videogame people, and contrary to the Smithsonian’s belief, videogames were not a welcome part of the elitist community. We were “new money,” so to speak; here because of novelty and curiosity and nothing more. The only thing to do now was to embrace our conduct, eat quickly and leave.

The Smithsonian was brimming with activity – the rigid, stuffy atmosphere of the traditional art world had been replaced, if only temporary, to take on a more commercial front. There was no sense of direction, of coherence, upon entering. Wide-eyed attendees trudged aimlessly, just trying to make sense of it all. My associate and I navigated through the crowd to the center, where a portly young man was standing with two books titled The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effect. “Are these for sale?” I asked. He nodded and pointed to the museum shop, which had blended in with the traffic of the crowd. We casually entered the shop which was pouring outside the door with consumers purchasing swag to commemorate the acceptance of video games into the art community. We glanced around and exited. This felt less like an art showing and more like a commercial entertainment event. It was jarring that just down the halls protruding from this central hub were collections of impressionists, realists and abstract paintings of the 19th and 20th centuries. These halls were all but empty, and those that were there were probably searching for the Art of Video Games exhibit. This was very much our day. Out in the courtyard the GameFest crowd was less concentrated, but the focus was meandering – there were open play activities, tables for pixel art, photo booths and tables to sit and contemplate your museum purchases. A familiar song began blaring over the scattered crowd – the Zelda theme, played by The Triforce Quartet. Right in front of the stage area was the Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog and all around were displays playing retro and modern games like Top Gun and Space Channel 5.

“This is nothing,” said an elderly lady who worked at the museum. “The line for the exhibit was out the front door earlier.” Now it was just echoing down the intimidating halls of the third floor, but with easily two to three hundred people still waiting in line to glimpse the art of video games. The crowd was mixed – from the very young to twenty-something’s to the middle-aged – there either deliberately or out of curiosity. Many who grew up in the game culture were hoping for a more artistic view of video games and were somewhat put off by the commercial atmosphere and obvious exhibition choices. Those who were curious outsiders, and mostly over forty, were awed: “It was absolutely amazing,” said the same museum worker outside on the steps of the Smithsonian. An elderly (and quite possibly homeless) man next to her agreed. “Amazing,” he repeated, before regaling us with stories of the injustices done to him by the DC police.

At a quarter to five, we excused ourselves from the old man’s tales and made our way down the steps and into the auditorium for Robin Hunicke’s “It’s All in the Design” lecture. The auditorium filled quickly, this time with concentrations of core gaming enthusiasts. After a brief introduction by Chris Melissinos, curator of the exhibit, Robin Hunicke took to the stage. She eased into her presentation and reassured the aspiring designers in the audience by mentioning she was brought on as a Sims 2 designer when she “was 32 years old and had never worked on a commercial game.” She spoke, at first, in a rehearsed manner, gesturing expressively with her hands. Her lecture touched on communication breakdowns and successful collaboration methods before getting into the real art behind game design, which turned out to be more psychology than art. “You can develop an ability to truly see through someone’s eyes to see both sides of a design – to see both sides of a problem,” said Robin. She explained the challenge of creating something compelling to players of all ages – quite the opposite of the traditional artist who discovers freedom through not acknowledging the impression he is going to make – the videogame artist is much more deliberate. This was the case with Robin’s design methodology, at least until she moved to LA to work on a new game. “The core principle of this game design was experimentation,” said Robin. “It was that people should feel comfortable playing to fail.” Her presentation moved toward more appropriate art territory rather than the art-sucker of appealing to everyone. She was learning to design to evoke a specific reaction from the player. “Not only do you need to focus on the exact right point in the design and really nail that one problem, you need to do it with the help of everyone at your disposal,” continued Robin, who concluded her lecture by discussing Journey. She put it out there that, in designing Journey, it was her “hope that players who meet each other online could experience a genuine human connection with each other.” Through years of game design trial and error, successes and failures, Robin Hunicke had finally tapped into the true art of games – one that explores the state of humanity and the nature of existence. “In much the same way as when you’re hiking in the wilderness, you might stop to take in the view or introduce yourself, or just even smile, at a passing stranger; whereas if you saw them on a crowded train you would just look right through them.” A simple elimination of player tags helped foster this goal organically rather than pushing it on the player.

As we boarded the metro back to Vienna, I remembered the Pac-Man question. The exhibit failed to give me a concrete answer, but I did leave the event enlightened. Just then, a girl wedged through the closing doors of the train, despite the warnings of her friends. One of her friends made it through but the last one got left behind. I thought about Robin’s train analogy, and of interaction, of connection. I would have to put myself out there to evoke a reaction that would create a connection in the real world. It’s a deliberate choice, and a choice that true art evokes from its audience. If you simply read a story and don’t think about it, it’s nothing more than printed words on a page. If you stare at a painting and don’t contemplate it, it’s just a collision of color. If you play a videogame, and by the end of it you haven’t taken anything with you but a high score, then maybe it’s not art. Videogames are a business with artistic sensibilities, and it shows in the Smithsonian’s exhibition. While the Smithsonian playing host to a videogames event was tremendous in that fact alone, the festivities and exhibition failed to explore the territory game journalism has been fearlessly covering for years now. It was clear that we were still not quite there as an art form, as only certain games have broken through that barrier, but we had broken through. The breakfast incident, however, made us acutely aware that we were in DC’s Smithsonian as novelty only: not fully accepted, still wet behind the ears. But I say to those elitist Hiltonites that we are going to sit among you anyway, drop our croissants and not give a damn what you think of us at all.