I was watching one BoredGamer’s videos on Star Citizen and noticed this brief segment screencap’d above. In the video, the ship being shown enters the scene from the lower left and performs some barrel-rolls before vanishing over the horizon. With the hazy sunlight peeking over the clouds, and a moon-slash-planet hanging out in the clear sky, I feel that the scene evokes happiness and a sense of joy.

I’d wager that the majority of games — certainly the popular games — want nothing to do with joy. They want conflict, and the messier the better. That’s how we get plots centered on “the fall of mankind” or post-apocalypse settings or just war in general. Someone, somewhere (usually the player) is fighting a bunch of other someones, across several different somewheres. These settings are never pleasant. A lot of the time these kinds of games take place in ruins, ancient or otherwise. Some Shit Went Down and now players are trekking through the mistakes of ancestors, content to make the same mistakes all over again. In a bid to take the edge off a bit, though, we’re often framed as “The Last Hope” for our family/our society/the World so that we’re not fighting everything in sight because we want to, but rather because we’re forced to in order to achieve a lasting peace…which I’m sure is what was said by all those people who made all of those buildings that now lie in ruin.

We don’t get a lot of “joyful” settings these days. Even in “cozy” games there’s going to be some sinister element at some point. The world of Palia, a game that’s all about “cozy community interaction” is built on the idea of a post-human society; who were they? Where did they go? What did they do? Some of the cozier games that look like they’re mostly about farming and sexing up the local pixels may involve heading into caverns to kill aggressive critters in search of resources. I’ll grant you that we also have Farming Simulator [Insert Year Here] which I submit is neither intrinsically violent nor intrinsically joyful, but that’s a whole other post, I suppose.

Capping it all off are players themselves. I submit that unless otherwise prompted, players are more likely to shoot first and never ask questions than they are to just enjoy the sensation of being. We’ve been trained that if the game play is centered around combat, then combat is always the solution of first resort. I’d also wager that if asked, most people would say they enjoy aggressive, violent games because it helps them “blow off steam”. That excuse reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend the other night who said that for all the grief social media and The Algorithm gets for making people upset, why was it never tuned to make people happier? Electing to be angry — even as an admitted form of self-therapy — feels like it would lead to just more anger, not less, because that would mean that being angry as a means of “blowing off steam” feels good. Couple that sensation with a sense of virtual accomplishment and I guess I’m feeling like video games maybe aren’t the best for mental health…at least not trending the way they have been trending throughout the years.

Trying it back to Star Citizen because why not, CIG is constantly beating the drum of “risk versus reward”, which is how they justify making everything about combat — even combatless activities like crafting, which will require players to put themselves in danger in order to obtain the best materials. I saw someone post the other day that (paraphrase mine) the current act of using the jump gate between Stanton and Pyro wasn’t “difficult” enough, and that it was impossible to fail. I never expected jump gates to be a magnet for failure, but because everything about Star Citizen has to focus on “risk versus reward”, I am finding little opportunity for joy, and that makes me sad — the opposite of joy. I think there could be so much to enjoy about being in a game world as realized as the one in Star Citizen, but that’s not going to happen because games these days have to be in service of being aggressively competitive. While I understand that people may enjoy aggressive competition, I would find it near impossible to believe that anyone gets giddy over the prospect of such a joyless experience.